Wycliffe’s outstanding STEM girls buck the trend
29 Aug 2018
Wycliffe’s pupils are celebrating an extraordinary set of results. The dazzling array of destinations for its leavers includes Oxford to read PPE, Imperial to study Medicine, UCL for Mechanical Engineering and Loughborough for Architecture.
And girls are leading the charge with two-thirds of the school’s A and A* grades in STEM subjects coming from its female students.
One of these, Annie Rees from Stonehouse will be heading to Imperial to study Medicine with her two A*s and two A grades in Maths, Chemistry, Physics and Further Maths.
India Duke from Wotton-under-Edge is taking up her place to read PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford following her two A*s and an A in Chemistry, Economics and Maths, while Kelly Fletcher from Faringdon, Oxfordshire, is off to the University of Manchester to study Biochemistry with an A* and two A grades in Maths, Biology and Chemistry.
Kelly had been a Boarding pupil at Wycliffe for more than a decade having joined in the Prep School, while India joined for Sixth Form from another independent school and Annie transferred from a local grammar school before her GCSEs.
In a cohort of pupils renowned for overcoming a wide array of difficulties over the years, Wycliffe’s overall A*-B grade proportion was among its best ever. Many of the pupils faced up to significant personal challenges and still produced outstanding results.
This year saw most subjects having been reformed with more content and harder assessments, and yet one in every eight of Wycliffe’s pupils achieved three or more A / A* grades, one in six achieved at least two A grades and 60% achieved 2 Bs or better. In 14 of the 28 subjects offered at Wycliffe, more than two thirds of grades were above B.
Head of Wycliffe College, Nick Gregory said,
“The sheer breadth and variety of the Wycliffe curriculum is intended to allow our leavers to study things in the Sixth Form about which they are genuinely enthusiastic and then enable them to take ‘next steps’ about which they are hugely excited.
This really is the case with this year’s seventy-six Year 13 leavers with destinations ranging from PPE (Oxford), Mechanical Engineering (UCL) and Medicine (Imperial) to degree courses as varied as Architecture, Animal Behaviour, Agriculture, Hospitality Management, Nursing, Criminology, Japanese and Urban Planning and others pursuing Degree Apprenticeships (e.g., in Finance or in Real Estate), careers in our Armed Forces, pilot training or Foundation courses elsewhere in Art or Drama, inspired by the emphasis we place here on the importance of the creative subjects.
As always, we are very proud of every single one of them, especially since we are aware of the adversity and personal challenges that several of them have had to overcome to get this far.”
Photo: India Duke