RUPERT Poole, Principal at Crediton’s Queen Elizabeth’s School has expressed his delight that students have achieved well in their GCSE results across the full range of subjects offered.

He commented: “Well done class of 2018 – you have done brilliantly!

“This was the first year group where most GCSEs are graded numerically with Grade 9 being the top grade. Subjects graded 9 to 1 for the first time include history, geography, sciences and modern languages, all of which have been designed to be more difficult.

“We are therefore delighted to report strong results across the broad range of subjects.

“There was a fantastic atmosphere in school this morning (Thursday, August 23), with lots of students collecting their results (and the all-important year book!) promptly at 9am. It is always so lovely to see them again after the summer break.”

“On behalf of all the staff here at QE, I would like to congratulate the students for their individual successes but also as a year group, they have been delightful and a pleasure to work with.

“I would like to thank all the staff, parents and carers for their hard work supporting the students through this time of change in the education system: these new GCSEs are much more difficult, make no mistake!

“Everyone in QE has been working hard to meet the challenges and I’m particularly pleased to see significant improvement in both science and modern foreign languages results.

“We are determined to maintain a broad curriculum despite the changes to GCSEs and I’m therefore delighted that our students have achieved so well across the full range of subjects we offer; we have seen stunning results in expressive arts and the wider curriculum such as food technology with an amazing number of the very rare grade 9s.

“A total of 70 per cent of our students met the new tough pass mark in five or more subjects and 66 per cent of students passed both their maths and English GCSE.

“We also have very good performance in humanities subjects such as geography, resulting in excellent achievement in the English Baccalaureate where I fully expect, once the figures are available, that we will compare very favourably to schools nationally.

“Our students are well prepared to take their next steps and I wish them all the very best for the future - many congratulations to them all. Today’s results come after our excellent A level results last week and we look forward to welcoming many of the students back into the Sixth Form in September.”