St Swithun’s students successfully negotiate their first public exams to achieve strong A Level results

After an unprecedented two years of uncertainty and challenging conditions for learning, this year’s U6 students from St Swithun's are now heading for university, having achieved excellent A Level results with 75% achieving A*/A grades.

This year’s students have chosen a particularly wide range of courses including Korean studies, Russian and Spanish, criminology, robotics, radiography, mechanical engineering, marine biology, life sciences, philosophy and fashion marketing in addition to perennial favourites such as medicine, veterinary medicine and psychology.

University College London and Cambridge University are two of this year’s most popular destinations followed by Bath, Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh, Exeter, Manchester and Newcastle.

In spite of this year’s A Levels being their first set of public exams, the upper sixth showed few nerves and instead relished the opportunity to embrace a sense of normality and to put their learning to the test. One student remarked: "I’m actually quite enjoying these exams."

The Headmistress, Jane Gandee, said: "This year group has shown itself to be both an intellectually engaged and light-hearted cohort, managing to combine rigorous academic endeavour with a sense of fun. We particularly enjoyed the whole school dance that they initiated, and we will miss them as they sashay away to further study or to a gap year."