Schools across England began teaching a selection of the new GCSEs and A-levels in September 2015. The first examinations will be sat in summer 2017.

One reason the government gave for having created the new (and more difficult) GCSEs and A-levels back in 2015 was to compete with countries at the top of the leaderboard in terms of academic achievement.

However, will increasing the difficulty of the examinations and the course content really increase the UK's international standing?

Countries are assessed in maths, reading and science by a governing body named PISA: the Programme for International Student Assessment. Finland, for example, performs well.

In the long term, reaching the same results as countries like Finland will surely require England to make changes to the way it teaches young people - rather than just simply increasing the difficulty and pressure on students. I admire the logic of the government: 'More pressure + harder material = statistically smarter kids, right?'

In an attempt to create a balanced argument, I decided to interview a mathematics teacher from a high school in Norfolk - to try to gain an insight into what it has been like to teach the new specification, and how students are coping with the (even harder) work - on a local level.

She said: 'The new [mathematics] GCSE brings in some content that was previously not seen until A-level. Understanding of the new syllabus for teachers has not been a problem - however, the amount we have to cover, given the extra difficulty, has proved challenging in this first year.'

On the topic of how her students are currently coping with the changes that have been in place for nearly a year, she stated that: 'The current specification is more difficult than the previous one', and 'as these children feed through to Key Stage 4, we should find that the new GCSE becomes less of a challenge for them. Like anything new, these things take time to settle and get right.'

So, do you think the new A-Levels and GCSEs will generate a better set of results come summer 2017? Comment below.

Sarah Betts, 16, Reepham High School