Cheney School Headteacher Rob Pavey said his pupils’ results showed the importance of ‘keeping your head, turning up and doing the right thing’.

He said the Oxford school had seen ‘a bit – but not much’ of the expected grade deflation as a result of a return to pre-pandemic grading.

“Grades have held up. They’re a bit down on last year, but not by a vast amount. This year’s students have done really well,” Mr Pavey said.

“What’s more important is the destination data, where they’re going onto, rather than obsessing about the individual grades.”

As well as a schooling pockmarked by the Covid-19 pandemic, in more recent months pupils across the country have been affected by teacher strikes.

The Cheney head said the school had protected year groups taking their exams from the impact of the strikes, ‘so there has been very little disruption’.

Oxford Mail: Rob Pavey of Cheney SchoolRob Pavey of Cheney School (Image: Oxford Mail)

Four pupils picking up their results on Thursday got into Oxbridge, with one going to Oxford and three to Cambridge. Four pupils had places to read Medicine.

Celebrating together were Faith Woodruffe-Peacock and Amir Rana, both 18, who are off to Bristol.

Faith scored four A* grades to secure her place reading maths and economics.

“It was hard doing exams, having not done exams before. Mentally, it was a lot because we'd never gone into an official exam before. I think we did pretty well to get through it. Makes all of the work worth it,” she said.

Friend, Amir said sitting the exams for real earlier this summer was ‘nothing like I'd done before, it was nothing like the mocks’.

He added: “We were the first year going back to [how it was] pre-Covid, so there were a lot of nerves. Finding out I did as well as I did, I was over the moon.”

He will study international relations and politics, and has hopes of maybe becoming a lawyer or working at the United Nations. “That’s something I’m quite passionate about. I like to be up there arguing the rights and wrongs,” he said with a smile.

Asked what his message was for the class of 2023, Headteacher Rob Pavey, said: “You have done fantastically. We really couldn’t be prouder of them. They have done really, really well, actually.

“It goes to show if you keep your head, turn up, do the right thing, you get the rewards.

“And we’ve got a really good set of results in terms of grades and, more importantly, we’ve got a really good set of results in terms of destinations and the students achieving [fantastically]; despite uncertainty and despite pressure and despite talk in the media about how it’s all going to be a disaster and it isn’t because they’ve done really well.”