In a shocking set of A-level results released today, a London public school in one of the capital’s poorest boroughs saw an astounding 430 students—nearly 90% of their cohort—obtain straight A* or A grades.
With 470 students, or 95%, choosing one of the top Russell Group colleges in Britain, Brampton Manor Academy also saw 85 students earn seats at Oxford or Cambridge universities after 89 offers were made.
The thriving school in Newham, East London, inaugurated its sixth form in 2012 with the goal of getting more underprivileged kids into prestigious schools. Since then, it has sent around 300 pupils to Oxbridge in under a decade.
85 offers from Oxbridge this year is a big increase from the 55 obtained in 2021 and 51 in 2020. In the sixth form, 58% of students achieved A*s, while 98% received A*s, A’s, or B’s.
Many of the top students at Brampton Manor, which has been dubbed the East End’s Eton, are from underrepresented ethnic groups, qualify for free school lunches, or will be the first in their families to enrol in college.
The number of offers from Oxford and Cambridge to Eton, which costs £46,296 a year to attend after a £3,200 acceptance fee, has decreased by half from 99 in 2014 to only 48 in 2021. Its data for Oxbridge in 2022 are not yet known.
After earning three A* grades, Dominykas Antanaitis—who receives free school lunches and will be the first member of his family to attend college—is headed to Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge to study engineering.
He added, “My heart stopped when I read the email; it took me some time to realise I had truly gotten in,” when asked to describe the moment he learned of the offer. I immediately contacted my mother, who was over the moon.
“There is no room for me to work at home, so I remain at school until 6 p.m. most days to study. I am really pleased that my hard work has paid off.”
Mehnaz Mushafa is another high achiever who is headed to Oxford to study philosophy, politics, and economics. She will be the first person in her family to attend college.
When discussing the difficulties of lockdown learning, she remarked, “It was hard not being with my friends, but the fact that we kept up with our entire schedule of live courses online while still in school uniform and with our cameras on really helped.”
“Throughout the lockdown, I simply kept thinking about the big picture and the reason I came to Brampton.”
Priscillia Nazziwa, who has been offered a place to study archaeology and anthropology at Oxford, claims that before attending university taster sessions in Year 12, she had never even heard of the topic.
Priscillia, who is the first member of her family to attend college, said that her parents were “overjoyed and emotional” and that “the word travelled through my family very quickly.”
Gabriel, a student who earned one A* and two As and is headed to Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge, came in the UK at the age of 10 and had to start learning the language from scratch.
According to him, if you continue, you can do everything you set your mind to. He claimed this after getting a spot at Cambridge.
Daisy Agidi, Saamiya Moallim, and Azeez Shekoni are three kids whose families will see all three of them following in the footprints of their elder siblings, who are already enrolled at Oxbridge after finishing their A-Levels at Brampton Manor.
Azeez will be joining his brother Harun, who is studying philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford, where he plans to get a medical degree.
It was a wonderful occasion for him and his family when he received his offer since he and his brother had both long dreamt of attending Oxford.
Coming to Brampton showed me that everyone can accomplish their objectives with hard work and persistence, regardless of background.
Today, Dr. Dayo Olukoshi, the executive administrator of the school, said: “We are really pleased of what our pupils have accomplished.
They have shown remarkable fortitude and tenacity to guarantee that the setbacks they have faced in recent years have not detoured them from their goals.
“We fervently believe that there is no ceiling to what our kids may accomplish with enough work and resolve.”
Overall, A-level scores for students in the UK have fallen from epidemic highs but are still higher than 2019 levels, with females continuing to outperform boys and geography displacing English literature from the list of the ten most popular courses.
This morning, the results were sent to the hundreds of thousands of students who took examinations this summer for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
According to Ucas numbers, university admissions have decreased from previous year but are still the second highest on record.
As part of a transition year when marks were intended to indicate a midpoint between last year and 2019, it had been anticipated that grades would decline from 2021 levels, when students were evaluated by their instructors.
According to the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), the total pass rate—the percentage of submissions receiving grades A* to E—dropped from 99.5% in 2021 to 98.4% this year.
However, this is now 0.8 points higher than it was in 2019, the year before the pandemic. The percentage of entries earning the highest grades of A* and A is down 8.4 points from 44.8 to 36.4 percent last year, but is up 11.0 points from 25.4 percent in 2019.
The percentage of students receiving the highest grade, A*, has decreased from 19.1% to 14.6% over the past year, but it is still higher than the 7.7% it received in 2019.
And while it is up from 75.9% in 2019, the percentage of entries graded A* to C decreased from 88.5 percent in 2021 to 82.6 percent this year.
According to the JCQ, there were 848,910 A-level entries in total, an increase of 2.4% over the previous year, as opposed to a 2.4% rise in the population of 18-year-olds.
A pioneer in diversity and inclusion issued a warning today as well, saying that in order to ensure that black students at Oxbridge are fairly represented, educational challenges after the epidemic must be ignored.
The creator of the Target Oxbridge programme said that black students in Year 12 had experienced higher levels of worry due to their disproportionately high exposure to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Having experienced educational interruption and dealing with the consequences, Naomi Kellman predicted that younger students wishing to enrol in the UK’s top institutions in the future years may face similar difficulties.
More than 350 students of black origin received assistance from Target Oxbridge, according to the organisation, helping to “change the narrative about who belongs at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.”
The ten-year-old programme expressed its satisfaction at having “contributed to such a dramatic shift” in the representation levels at the two institutions.
Despite making up 5% of the A-level student population when the programme was first introduced, black African and Caribbean students only made up around 1% of UK-based Oxbridge students.
Target Oxbridge reported that as of 2021, the percentage of black students from the UK who were admitted to Oxbridge has increased to 4%, with almost a quarter (24%) of those students being graduates of the programme.
While Cambridge welcomed 128 UK black students this year, compared to 26 in 2011, Oxford admitted 3.5% more UK undergraduates of black African or black Caribbean origin in 2018 than it did in 2017.
Although Ms. Kellman applauded the developments, she insisted that work must still be done, particularly over the following few years while the pandemic’s aftereffects are still being felt.
In comparison to 74 last year, she said that 60 offers had been made to Target Oxbridge participants this year.