Teenager gets A in GCSE Chemistry she sat hours after escaping Grenfell Tower
A teenager who escaped the Grenfell Tower inferno the night before her chemistry exam has been awarded an A grade.
Ines Alves, who lived with her family on the 13th floor, fled the burning tower in the middle of the night with just her phone and chemistry notes before continuing to sit the 9am exam in the same clothes she had left in.
Now, the 16-year-old has achieved a grade 9 in her maths and Chemistry GCSEs – equivalent to an A under the old system.
Speaking after receiving her results at Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith, west London, Ines said: ‘It’s good. I’m quite happy with my grades. I wish I did more, but then again, I don’t know, it hasn’t sunk in yet.
‘For the exams I missed, I didn’t do too well in them overall.’
In the days after the fire, Ines missed two history exams, one RE exam and one physics exam, which affected her overall grades. She also admitted that she initially believed that the fire was “nothing major” and was adamant on sitting the exam.
‘That’s all I had on I had on my mind’, she said.
There was no point me carrying on watching the building burning so I just went in.’
Ines, who also gained an A in her Spanish GCSE, is now living in a hotel with her family more than two months after the blaze. As she collected her results, she was accompanied by her brother, Tiago, 20, who said he was ‘very proud’ of his sister.
‘I am really proud of her – I have no words for it’, he said.
‘It seems very surreal even though I knew she was going to get it. Maths has been one of our strongest subjects family-wise.’
Headteacher Marian Doyle also praised Ines’ result as ‘fantastic’.
‘Given that she had a number of exams still to do and in the face of that adversity and that shock, and I suppose the reflection of ‘what if’… she gathered this strength, that inner spirit’, she said.
‘The girls have dreams and aspirations and they are supported in having the highest dreams and aspirations, and that determination to keep going, that inner strength, that inner core to keep going… everything that she’d worked for, she wasn’t going to let go just as a result of this.
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‘It must have been so hard for her to actually come in and do that and try to blot out the scenes of what she had seen.And to do that just says a lot about Ines and young people in general, who get a bad press.
‘They do seek to do their best, they are genuinely good young people.’
