A teenage girl who wowed the nation by sitting a GCSE chemistry exam just hours after escaping the Grenfell Tower fire has revealed that she aced the paper.
Fleeing her family’s home on the 13th floor of the block on the night of the blaze, Ines Alves escaped with just her phone and her revision notes in tow.
The next day, the determined 16-year-old sat the chemistry exam in the clothes she had escaped in.
But despite the dire circumstances surrounding the test, Alves revealed on Thursday that she achieved an A grade.
Speaking on This Morning, the teen said she was able to “block out” the situation for the duration of the test, but “broke down in tears” when it ended.
Dozens of families lost their homes in the June 14 fire that claimed at least 80 lives.
Alves said she struggled to understand why she got so much attention for taking the test.
“At the time, I just thought it was a normal thing, going to sit an exam,” she said.
Speaking the day after the paper, she said: “I want to take chemistry for A Level and needed to get a good grade in my science GCSE to go ahead.
“It’s my strongest science, it was worth doing it [rather] than not doing it.”
Her brother Tiago said there are “no words” to describe what he sister did.
Meanwhile, Alves’ headteacher at Sacred Heart High School, Marian Doyle, called her results “fantastic”.
She told the BBC: “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.”