Mia Headington found out she had dyslexia the day before her first GCSE exam, but the diagnosis didn’t faze her. Opening her results envelope on Thursday morning, the 16-year-old found out she had done much better than in her mock exams, achieving five A*s, an A, two Bs and a C.
“I am chuffed,” the Maesteg school pupil said. “I didn’t expect to do this well, although I’m going to resit the C in English Language. The essays were difficult. Now I know why!”
Mia said she would stay on at the sixth form at Maesteg school in south Wales’s Llynfi valley, and wants to go on to study dentistry at university.
“I’m so proud of her,” said her mother, Allison, wiping away tears. “She was at school at 7.30am every day preparing coursework and revising … She arrived before the teachers sometimes.”
About 180 Maesteg pupils arrived to pick up their GCSE results over the course of Thursday morning. Last week’s A-level results were the school’s best ever: GCSE attainment was not quite as high as expected, but the school had still “held its own”, said the headteacher, Helen Jones. In Wales and Northern Ireland, GCSEs are still graded using letters A* to G, while England uses numbers 9-1.
Across Wales, GCSE grades were slightly up on last year, with 62.5% of pupils achieving A* to C, or seven and above, an increase of 0.3% compared with 2024. However, the country still lags behind England, where the percentage of top grades achieved was 21.8%, compared with 19.5%.
The overall pass rate was 62.5% in Wales, compared with 67.1% in England. A major overhaul of Welsh school qualifications comes into effect in September.
But there were more smiles than frowns in Maesteg on Thursday, where a banner reading “We’re so proud of you” greeted pupils outside the building, and screens inside the school hall cycled through photos from prom. Staff were on hand giving out “golden tickets” – invitations to a “what’s next” event next week featuring careers and CV help, vocational training, practical advice and other support options for those unsure about the future.
This year’s GCSE cohort made the important transition from primary to secondary school in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, and this year’s results are the first that did not take “lost learning” into account.
Despite the disruption, Gethin Williams, Maesteg’s top achiever with seven A*s and three As, said he didn’t feel as though the year group had missed out too much. “I’m actually glad it was earlier and not during the later years when we had exams, that would have been harder,” he said.
Ella Ronan, who got two A*s, five As and two Bs and will study biology, history, PE and psychology for A-level, said: “I think we missed out more socially than the educational stuff. The teachers worked really hard to catch us up.”
Jones said: “Today’s success reflects how our teachers are all about raising aspirations and expectations.”
The new Welsh curriculum being introduced in schools since 2022 would bring new challenges, she added.
“There is more focus on internal assessment, rather than exams, which is great for some learners, but will be more gruelling over a longer period of time for pupils and teachers,” she said.
Brown results envelopes distributed, Maesteg’s pupils, parents and teachers were ready to celebrate their hard work. The school’s staff left together for a belated end-of-year lunch; Lara Davies, who got two A*s, said she and her friends were heading into Cardiff on the train for a day of shopping and sweet treats at Kaspa’s Desserts.
“I was panicking this morning but I’m so relieved now,” she said. “I’m really proud of all of us.”
