FROM inner city colleges to top private schools, the region's class of 2000 put up a formidable performance in their A-level exams.

There were spectacular increases in top grades at many high-achieving schools and colleges, while others made gains across all grades in yesterday's results.

The only real bugs in the millennium's results day were computer failures at Fareham College and the private St Mary's College in Southampton.

Students got their results but the colleges could not work out their overall performance and Fareham College does not expect to know its results until Monday.

The highest individual score reported to the Daily Echo was achieved by a student from Winchester College who gained six A grades. He was closely followed by two students at Brockenhurst College, who each notched up five A grades plus a distinction at S level.

Sixth-form colleges across the region put in a solid performance, with most maintaining healthy leads on the national average. Impressive gains were made across the board at both Southampton's sixth-form colleges - including 17 students at Taunton's College gaining three or more A grades.

Meanwhile, Brockenhurst College boosted its A-C grades from 57 per cent to 60 per cent and Totton College saw them go up from 51 per cent to 53 per cent.

Private schools managed to ratchet up scores that were already very high, but the really big winners were secondary schools across the region that have recently set up sixth forms.

The 47 students at Bay House School in Gosport - the third group at the school - gained A grades in 31 per cent of the exams they took - up four percentage points on last year and nearly double the school's 1998 figure.

Applemore Technology College at Dibden Purlieu, has only put two groups of students through A-levels so far. But the 50 students in this year's group gained A-C grades in 40 per cent of exams taken - up 15 per cent on last year. Arnewood School at New Milton, put 68 students through A-levels this year - its third group of sixth-formers - and A grades went up by four percentage points to 24.5 per cent.

Frank Callaghan, principal of Applemore, said: "Students that are staying at their schools to study A-levels are improving at a very high rate.

"In a school sixth form, you get far fewer students, but almost as many subjects on offer. We have much smaller, and more stable, teaching groups with a lower drop-out rate.

"The key to getting higher results is the individual attention that students get in smaller tutorial groups."

As girls gained more A grades than boys nationally for the first time ever - and did best in the traditionally male preserves of maths and physics - some of the region's heads reported similar trends in their colleges.

Peter Church, principal of Itchen College, said: "Of the top 24 students at Itchen, 63 per cent are girls.

"'We are looking at ways of boosting the self-confidence of boys to improve their exam performance.

"Young women have got the confidence that they didn't have years ago and now it is the boys who seem to be losing confidence."

Mr Church said the steady improvement in A-level results at both the city's sixth form colleges boded well for Curriculum 2000, the new programme of study for 16- to 18-year-olds being introduced from September.

"We hope to expand the numbers taking both A-levels and AS-levels as the new curriculum comes in ," he said.

Under Curriculum 2000, students will study a larger number of subjects in the first year and take AS-levels in all of them. They will then continue with three or more of the subjects, taking A-level exams at the end of the second year.

The government reform aims to encourage more students to stay on in the sixth form and to broaden the curriculum, without sacrificing standards..

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.