(1/15) So a rundown of what my classist A Level journey was like...

I'd done well in my GCSE's. It was 2008, I was waiting to start Sixth Form. If you want an example of how alienating education is for poorer people, I didn't even know what an "A Level" was. https://twitter.com/JoshAlexCairo/status/1293858120113049600

(2/15) No one in my family had done them, or the older O Levels, to completion... so that itself was a learning experience.

A week before term started on Year 12 I got called in urgently to the school. Apparently they couldn't accommodate my subject choices any more.

(3/15) Despite having worked towards my choices specifically, they were forcing me to change my entire education trajectory and do something different for A-Level, as they were accommodating more incoming language students, and it made a teacher shortage in other subjects.

(4/15) With only a week until term, there was no way of changing schools at that point. I dug my heels in and refused to change to subjects I didn't want nor need, and insisted on teaching myself one of the affected subjects. It wasn't ideal at all, but I couldn't give up.

(5/15) They eventually reluctantly agreed, providing me with the basic textbooks and a few sheets of guidance on the Biology A Level, which I began teaching myself in every spare moment I had. Whilst doing English, Psychology, and Geography A-Levels as well.

(6/15) I was averaging 17 hours of work time a day, six or seven days a week. I had no computer at home, so research had to be done in limited library hours (that cost money too), and essay drafts were written by hand, from scratch, over and over again.

(7/15) By Christmas 2008 they'd stopped even checking up on if I was still working at the Biology, which I was. Other subjects began getting critical when the inevitable, though only slight decline came to my coursework in their lessons.

(8/15) I persevered all through AS year, only to find out in the most awful way, that the school hadn't entered me for the AS Biology exam. They never told me, I found out as I was queuing to go in and my name didn't get called out. They gave me no explanation.

(9/15) They never submitted my coursework either, so whilst other subjects all took a hit and my AS grades weren't what they could have been, I walked away from AS Biology with no examined evidence I'd even done the subject at all. And yet, they still made it worse...

(10/15) Starting Year 13 they said I'd be eligible for AS Biology "resits" (despite never having 'sat') but I'd have to pay for them myself, and it'd be expensive as I'd have to redo all the coursework and have it independently assessed as well. I'd also be having to do this...

(11/15)... on top of the A Level Biology workload, and I'd likely have to pay for those exams as well. When I realised the step up in pressure of all the other subjects in that final year, I gave up. I had to focus on damage limitation to all my other subjects.

(12/15) There is nothing more demotivating than your final year of school being damage control on problems that weren't caused by you. Some would argue I should have just changed subjects and trajectory in Year 12. Whether that's true isn't the point though. I finished Year 13.

(13/15) I got passable grades but nowhere near what I could have got, and even better still if I didn't have the audacity to be poor. The point is they failed to support me any step of the way, then actively stood in my way when it mattered most.

(14/15) Summer 2010, I finish. The Tories got into government that year and much began to change. My friends were off to uni that summer, and I had rapidly gone from one of the 'star pupils' to having to figure out what a job centre was so me and my family didn't starve.

(15/15) It's taken me ten years to right these wrongs. The decade has been more awful than good. Fixing their mistakes has been a depressing, expensive journey. A lesson that if you're from a disadvantaged background and it goes wrong, you'll be treated like you're nothing.

(16/15) Stand by the kids impacted by the farce of exam results this year. Collectively fight it so that no one has to end up left behind like I was. I was one kid who fell through cracks in the system... and no one cared.

We cannot let it wreck lives as it does any more.