Melksham Oak A Level Results

Today is the day that the UCAS website crashed as thousands of A Level students flooded online to see if they had got their university places. With the rush on to beat the rise in tuition fees coming in next year, 9,000 more school kids applied to university this year than in 2010.

Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Warwick have already sniffily announced they will not be entering clearing this year as throughout the country university places are oversubscribed by up to 200,000.

So how did pupils at Melksham Oak Community School fare? The doors opened late at 10.10am this dismal rainy morning to let them pick up their results. Spirits were high and nervous but generally there were a lot of happy faces.

Jodie Francis got B, D, E in psychology, sociology A level, and an AS level in English Media. She didn't apply for uni this year as she wasn't sure what she wanted to do, so she may be off to travel for a little bit.

She said, "I also looked at applying for college to gain extra qualifications, as it's so hard to find a job at the minute, so I thought instead of wasting my days, I could use them to get more qualifications, but still I'm not sure what sort of thing to go for."

Lawrence Goddard got two Cs and 2 Ds and is off to Trent to study architecture. Another happy face. Charlotte Hook, just back from Honduras on a Melksham Oak charity-based trip, needed three Cs to get onto the English Lit BA course at Plymouth University. She went way better than that, scoring two Bs and a C, so there were family celebrations all around. She is off in September, preferring to get in quick before tuition fees shoot up.

Overall pass rates for Melksham Oak were up at 98%; this is an increase of 0.4% on 2010.