IT is nearly 30 years since I last sat an exam, but I still have a recurring dream that I’m sinking in a pile of revision.

It’s pretty much the same dream every time: I have exams coming up - proper school exams, like French, maths and geography - and am in a mild panic about running out of time.

I spent about 15 years of my life taking exams - at school, university, journalism college, and finally juggling exams with working as a trainee reporter when I was in my mid-twenties. Exams will forever be in my system.

My recurring dream dredges up the nerves, stress and looming sense of inevitability that I felt at school, when we had it drummed into us that these were the exams that would determine the rest of our lives. And now, 30 years on, these dreams are so vivid that even when I wake up, there remains a nagging feeling that I have a chemistry paper to sit, or yet another revision timetable to navigate. The relief when I come to my senses is immense!

No longer will I have to sit another exam - but exams have never left me. Yet, despite the fear and stress of them still churning up my subconscious, I’m grateful for exams.

I think we’re a bit cheated when teachers and careers advisors tell us that passing exams is the gateway to a better salary - I know plenty of people who went straight onto the employment ladder after school, with few or no qualifications, and were much better off financially than I was as an impoverished graduate - but without those exams, interminable as they were, I wouldn’t have been able to do the job I always wanted to do.

And to this day, whenever exam season rolls around I relish the freedom of no longer having to sit a single one. This time of year was dominated by three-hour ordeals - often two in a day - followed by hours of revision, and revision-of-revision, late into the evening. When I finally finished my A-levels, I remember wondering what on earth I was going to do with all this time on my hands.

Exams are a deliberately challenging chapter of young lives. They’re not meant to be a walk in the park. They’re designed to test knowledge, stamina, time management, self discipline and the ability to operate under pressure.

I’m not sure it does kids any favours to hold their hands through the process. I read a report recently about the rise in children and young people being referred to counsellors to cope with exam stress. In the report, youngsters said exam worries and pressures from school were affecting their mental health. But surely it’s perfectly normal to feel anxious or stressed about exams. That’s the point of them. It’s a tough time, but it doesn’t last forever. While some young people do need additional support or counselling, surely in most cases it’s better for parents to help kids work out a sensible revision plan, encourage their hard work, and reassure them that as long as they do their best, there’s no additional pressure.

It’s okay to stress out over exams, even if it doesn’t feel it at the time. I still recall the grim, relentless slog of sitting my finals, and the wretched night my friend and I stayed up till dawn to finish our dissertations, snatching sleep in shifts and waking each other up to get on with it. We were so wired and exhausted, she threw up and I broke out in a rash. But, hey, we got through it, and we look back and laugh about it now.

Life’s full of challenges, I think exams help to prepare us for them. And no matter how tough it feels at the time, there comes a time when neither you, nor anyone else, cares a jot what grade you got in geography GCSE.

I will probably have the recurring exam dream forever, but I can live with that. At least when I wake up there is no longer a hellishly complicated revision timetable stuck on my bedroom wall.