Exam results are in!

The wait for exam results is over and the early indications are that candidates have performed well in 2010 and that Edinburgh’s overall good performance has been maintained.

While candidates have been on the emotional rollercoaster waiting for results, the Council’s schools staff have been busy number crunching to work out how the city has performed as a whole.

Highlights include:

* Performance in Highers has continued to improve in S5 and S6
* Numbers of presentations and passes have increased in Advanced Highers
* 92% of candidates sitting English and Mathematics at S-Grade achieved SQA level 3 or better
* Good performance in the first year of Baccalaureate and Interdisciplinary Projects

City Education Leader Cllr Marilyne MacLaren said:

“We’ve analysed exam statistics for the city and early signs are showing that our pupils have performed very well.

“As an education authority we are particularly pleased with this because it shows, that despite the large savings we’ve had to make over the past two years, our efforts to focus on the highest quality learning and teaching and on excellence across the curriculum are making an impact.

“We will now go away and look at the results in more depth so we can see exactly where pupils are doing well and, more importantly, to identify where we need to provide more support.”

“We’ve all sat exams in our time so it’s easy to imagine the anticipation and tension across hundreds of households in Edinburgh this morning. Results day is always nerve wracking but, regardless of grades, it’s a day for young people to look to the future and think about the next big steps in their lives.

“Whatever the grades, this is the next exciting stage of life for thousands of young people and I wish them all the best.”

Across Edinburgh’s secondary and special schools, 45,395 results were presented to 9,571 pupils with awards gained in a range of 72 different subjects. Subjects showing increases in popularity and passes include: Chemistry, Computing, Gaidhlig, History, Media Studies, Physics, Psychology, Technological Studies, and Urdu.