So about a month before my actual exams I found out through social media that all a levels had been cancelled. And I’d say initially I was quite relieved, because I didn’t actually have to do the exams. 

But it was completely surreal to me. It’s one of the biggest exams I’ll take and it’s the stepping stone to go to university. 

And I’ve always personally quite liked to slack probably a bit during the year and then try and just cram for my exams and smash it, smash it out. Which meant that this was going to be the opposite of what I was kind of used to.

My name’s Ollie. I’m 18 years old and I’m from Brighton. 

I needed to get one A and two Bs to get into my course to go to the University of Liverpool and study International Business. And it came to the night before the time that I actually got my results and I couldn’t… it took me a while to fall asleep because I was quite anxious about what I was going to get and what was going to happen for me.

So I woke up the next day a couple of minutes before eight. 

I clicked on the email and saw that I was given one B and two Cs. 

Three grades that I definitely thought did not reflect what I would have got and even, to be honest, what I was working at throughout the year, which definitely meant that I wasn’t going to get into my course. And from that point I slightly panicked. I didn’t exactly know what I was meant to do. Our grades had been marked through Boris’ way of grading A level students. 

Reporter: Here’s how it works. First the students are given grades, but are also ranked by their teachers. The programme then applies other factors. If the student cohort performed less well in previous years, an adjustment is made. The predicted grades are also set against the school’s past performance. Matching with previous years can jostle students further downwards. 

And a lot of people in my college got downgraded. And we were all kind of fuming. It felt completely out of our hands. 

I was at my dad’s house. And he had his phone on the table and I had my phone on the table and we both called in, back to back, anyone – anyone we could – to try and gain a bit more clarity. 

Thank you for calling Ofqual.  

Thank you for calling the University of Liverpool. 

And I’d say on that day I probably called the university and the exam board about twenty times each. 

Thank you for calling Ofqual.  

Thank you for calling the University of Liverpool. 

Thank you for calling Ofqual.  

Thank you for calling the University of Liverpool. 

Please note all calls are recorded.

And the only piece of information we were told was that by 3pm we would be told whether we were accepted or denied from our university. And then at three – exactly on the dot – I was told that I’d been denied because of my grades. 

My next three years of my life had been completely stopped just because of an algorithm. 

And what I found completely unfair was something like 40% of all grades in the UK had been downgraded, but something like 95% of them were low income areas around the schools. And none of the private schools, none of the higher income areas where the schools are located had been downgraded with their grades. Which I thought was completely unfair. Me and hundreds of thousands of other students. 

Crowd sounds. Protests. 

So during this whole time, this whole time of uncertainty, I’d taken up skipping. I had been training before in mixed martial arts. I started at 5 o’clock every day, skipping for 45 minutes and it was kind of… kind of a way to get me out of all of the stress, all of the anxiety around my grades and around what was gonna happen. 

And it’s a repetitive action which kind of allows your body and mind to kind of drift. And while your feet are hitting the ground at exactly the same time every second and your arms are moving doing the exact same repetition every single time, it kind of allows your body to go into a trance. You don’t really think about anything. You kind of just focus on the beat – the rhythm of moving up and down, and it kind of allows you to go into another… go into another mindset. It was very, very, very important. I don’t think I realised at the time how important it was. 

Reporter: Ministers were forced to abandon the exam regulator OFQUAL’s computer modelling for A level and GSCE results…

A week and a half later there was something called the U Turn. 

Reporter: …after an outcry when 40% of entries were downgraded.

Which was quite literally the best news I could have heard. So I checked our new grades – given to us by our teachers – and I’d been given three Bs. Which definitely meant that I had a lot more hope in getting into the university that I wanted to. 

It was probably about eight days after that and I was kind of nervous because everybody I knew had been told the news on whether they’d been accepted or not. I kind of felt like I was the only person that hadn’t heard anything. And I just thought I’d check my spam folder in my emails - which I never check. 

And there was my letter of acceptance to Liverpool University.  

I was… I went crazy. I was really happy. I ran out of my room. I ran to my mum’s room, told her – although she was asleep, she woke up – went into my brother’s room and… I was, honestly, I was, I was… ecstatic.

After two months of uncertainty, all the calls and all the effort I’d put in had actually come out and I was gonna go to the university that I actually wanted to go to. And although I’d heard that there was gonna be restrictions in place – that maybe my freshers wasn’t gonna be exactly the same as everyone in the years before me – I was still excited. 

Although this whole lockdown and Coronavirus has been a big stress to be honest, I’ve learned that I can’t take anything for granted. Because it can be taken away from me quite easily. 

And that I can be resilient through shitty situations where I don’t have any control of any outcomes. 

And I need to not just give up hope.