Tyneside comprehensive school pupil Laura Spence, who famously failed to get a place at Oxford University, is keeping quiet about her A-level results.

Laura was at the centre of a row over admissions to the university when she failed to get a place at Magdalen College, but was then accepted by Harvard in America to read biochemistry.

Chancellor Gordon Brown attacked the old school tie interview system at colleges like Magdalen.

But the 18-year-old, who collected her results today from Monkseaton Community High School in Whitley Bay, has decided not to make her results public, her school said. Oxford West and Abingdon MP Dr Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for higher education, said: "While I recognise the right of Laura Spence to keep her actual A-level grades to herself, it is in stark contrast to the way her headteacher and the Chancellor of the Exchequer paraded her anticipated results in front of the nation's press some months before she had actually taken the exams."

He added: "Even if Laura Spence gets grade As in her A-levels, Gordon Brown and his colleagues get F grades for their ill-judged and inappropriate comments." Dr Harris said the Chancellor's claim that he wanted to increase the number of students from poorer backgrounds entering higher education shouldn't be taken seriously because he had made students even poorer by removing maintenance grants and imposing tuition fees.