Five A grades - but still not good enough

Five A grades - but not good enough

Will Woodward, education editor
Friday August 15, 2003
The Guardian

A record number of students confirmed their university places yesterday, but some of the very best revealed that they had been rejected by their first choices, on a day which brought a welter of spectacular individual achievements.
More than 280,000 school-leavers had taken up their higher education places, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service said last night, well above the 226,000 at this time last year.

As the once-remarkable sight of a student with five A grades at A-level became almost routine, Trinity College, Cambridge, found itself embroiled in a row that recalled the case of the Tyneside teenager Laura Spence, whose rejection by Oxford in 2000 was condemned by the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown.

Candice Clarke, one of 19 students at Colchester county high school for girls in Essex to obtain five As, said she was "devastated" to be rejected by Trinity for a place to read medicine. She grew up on a council estate, both of her parents are disabled, and none of her family has been to university.

"I was angry. I deserved to go there and worked really hard. Oxbridge should take more working class people from state schools, they should have a bigger range of people," she said. She was also turned down by Nottingham and Bristol but has won a place at Newcastle.

Paul Wingfield, admissions tutor at Trinity, said: "There is an enormous amount of competition for places to study medicine at Cambridge. We received 1,157 applications this year for 278 places, so unfortunately a large number of very bright students will always be unsuccessful in their application. We can not comment on individual cases, but would like to wish Ms Clarke every success in her future."

David Lee Watkins, a student at South East Essex sixth form college, was more sanguine about being turned down by Trinity, despite coming away with five As at A-level and two extra at AS-level.

He is going to Imperial College, London, to read maths. Esther Son, from St Crispin's school, in Wokingham, Berkshire, made up a trio of high-performing Trinity rejects. She will take her six As at A-level to Imperial too.

One successful Trinity applicant, Tom Carver, 18, of Colyton grammar school, Devon, laid claim to the title of this year's top-performer, with five A grades and two Bs in one go.

Perhaps no student shone more brightly than Judith Dunthorne, of King Edward VI school in Handsworth, Birmingham. She has overcome brain surgery to get four A grades at A-level to add to her eight A* passes at GCSE.

After her GCSEs she took a year out of school for more surgery and had to learn to write with her right hand when she had been left-handed.

"I'm pleased and relieved," Judith said yesterday as she prepared to go to Durham University to read history. "I've had a lot of support from school and from the hospital, and I think my faith helps a lot."

Delyth Chambers, director of admissions at Birmingham, said subjects such as medicine, English, dentistry and psychology had filled up quickly with well-qualified applicants.

But she added: "We still have vacancies for physical sciences, engineering and modern languages. There's not enough students wanting to do these subjects. I think it's a tragedy."

That echoed fears expressed by headteachers on Thursday that students were being drawn to easier, mixed-discipline subjects rather than core science and language subjects.

In a Guardian article today David Miliband, the schools standards minister, condemns critics for a "cascade of vitriol" against students. "As for so-called 'easy' subjects, the percentage of pupils getting grade A in psychology, law and business studies is less than half the figure in maths and classics," he says.