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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jamieclarke" data-source="post: 96475" data-attributes="member: 19336">Hi, can anybody help me with how having poor GCSEs will affect me with gaining training contracts, and other schemes I'm wanting to apply to in order to improve my application. I'm talking really bad here. I left school with only 3 passes, being 3 GCSEs grade 4 and above. I had to resit my maths and english and now have passes in those at grade 5 and 6 respectively. My A-levels, however, are A*A*A.I'm currently a first year law student and for first year schemes such as insight days, there's a mitigating circumstances box, but I don't know if what I want to put is serious enough and it's not really what they're looking for. I feel like putting what they'll consider to be weak mitigating circumstances will only make my application worse. What I've drafted now to put in place for mitigating circumstances is just effectively blaming my school for being poor and student behaviour which disrupted every lesson which the teachers couldn't control. I didn't care about my GCSEs and never revised for them at all. Being in an environment every day for 5 years around the same people who mucked about in every lesson, who didn't care about school effectively rubbed off onto me. With parents with no real academic qualifications, there was no academic pressure on me at all. The school I attended scored 'well below average' for GCSE attainment and was ranked 'unsatisfactory' by OFSTED for a time when I was there.There are also some personal circumstances (arguably medical) but again nothing serious and tbh, the reasons I listed above is really the main reason I failed my GCSEs.One of the questions for a CC programme aimed at 'disadvantaged' students asks for 'an achievement of importance which you are most proud of'. I've used my poor GCSEs and going on to attaining high A-Levels as my achievement and said that this makes me 'unique' and how I'm resilient etc. I think I'm going to use this for the CC app as it is specifically for 'disadvantaged' students, but would this be good to use in future apps of any kind, as I suppose it is rare for somebody to perform so badly at GCSE to go on and get top A Levels. Would firms recognise this as an achievement and could my poor GCSEs almost be an advantage as it would make me stand out amongst other applications?</blockquote>

Verification: Our company is called, "The Corporate ___ Academy". What is the missing word here?

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