Race for university places after A-level surge

SCOTTISH pupils sat almost 6,000 A-levels this year as the pass-rate went up for the 29th year in a row.

More than 250,000 pupils across the UK received their results yesterday prompting an intense battle for university places, with those who miss out this year facing tuition fees of up to 9,000 a year if they study south of the Border from next year onwards.

But many youngsters did not know for hours whether they had a place after problems on a key university admissions website.

The exam is sat by the vast majority of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with Scottish youngsters generally sitting Highers.

However, thousands of Scottish teenagers, mainly at independent schools, do sit A levels, with 5,988 being taken this year. Some consider the qualifications carry more weight in the contest for university places than highers.

At the Edinburgh Academy, 13 per cent of sixth form pupils taking A Levels achieved A* grades and 36.5 per cent achieved A* or A grades. The school also achieved almost 10 per cent more A* and A grades than the national average for last year.

St George's School for Girls in Edinburgh, like the Edinburgh Acadamy, achieved a 100 per cent pass rate. Of these 97 per cent achieved grades A to C and 70 per cent achieved grades A* to A.

Overall, the A-level pass rate rose slightly from 97.6 per cent to 97.8 per cent. Boys have closed the gap with girls at the very top grade of A* and more teenagers are opting to do science and maths. Entries for maths, and further maths rose by 7.4 per cent while there were also increases for biology (7.2 per cent), chemistry (9.2 per cent) and physics (6.1 per cent).

But fewer teenagers are opting to take traditional modern languages at A-level - a trend that has been seen for many years. Entries for French and German fell again - this year by 4.7 per cent and 6.9 per cent respectively.

Applications have reached record levels and with a drop in the number of teenagers taking a gap year, universities have been raising their entry requirements.

A website used by students to check on places was put back online yesterday after it was shut due to unprecedented demand. Tens of thousands of youngsters were left in the dark when the Ucas Track service was shut at 8:40am.

Ucas insisted that students' ability to choose a "clearing" place will not have been affected by the closure. Clearing is the process that matches students without a university place to courses that are still available. At one stage yesterday, the Ucas website was receiving 450 hits per second - nearly four times as many as last year.

Liam Burns, president of the National Union of Students, said: "It is hardly surprising that we have seen such a huge volume of web traffic this year as university applicants consider the options available to them.

"At an already stressful time, technical difficulties don't help matters."

Last night more than 384,000 would-be students had had their university applications accepted, while about 185,000 people were eligible for clearing. Both figures were up on last year.