A head teacher of a high-achieving Sydenham sixth form school celebrated A Level results day with the students through Skype today.

Final year pupils at Sydenham High, an all-girls school located on Westwood Hill, celebrated with champagne and miniature tea cakes following the success of their exams.

But school head Kathryn Pullen, who is on a visit to Australia setting up a student exchange programme, put aside her commitments to chat to the unsuspecting girls who had found out their exam results in the early hours of the morning.

She congratulated the girls, who huddled around the wide-screen television, asking them if they had all got the results they craved.

All who attended the ceremony were delighted with their results including Rose Cope, of Herne Hill, who has just been accepted to study Education with Modern and Medieval French at Cambridge University.

The 18-year-old said: “I was really nervous before finding out my results but am absolutely chuffed to bits with what I’ve got.”

Miss Cope said she plans to celebrate her results, which include one A* and two As, by going to the pub with her dad this evening.

She added: “I really want to be the best teacher I can possibly be as I’ve been so inspired by the teachers here who have given us so much support. I went through a very stressful and challenging interview process at Cambridge and the teachers here were massively supportive during that time.”

Another high-achiever who recently had a book published aimed to support the children in need of heart surgery for an Extended Project Qualification, was 18-year-old Olivia Muir, also of Herne Hill.

She said: “I was extremely nervous and didn’t sleep the night before and was constantly checking the UCAS site.”

Miss Muir, who re-took her biology A Level exam to bump her grade up to an A, has won a place at Exeter University to study an intensive three-year clinical psychology course.

Head teacher Ms Pullen said: “In perhaps the most challenging A Level exam year for more than a decade, our girls have worked hard to achieve these results and we are extremely proud of them. Their resilience and determination will stand them in good stead in approaching their futures – at university and then in the world of work.”