Student who battled with cancer throughout A-levels receives straight A*s

A 19-year-old student is celebrating after achieving three A*s at A-level despite battling with cancer during her studies.

Phoebe Pickering, from Brighton, gained her results in Latin, English literature and philosophy at Brighton College and will go on to study philosophy at Cambridge.

The teenager took a year off when she underwent the most intensive treatment to battle the soft tissue Ewing's sarcoma of the kidney before returning to finish off her studies.

She said: "I feel slightly in shock, it hasn't really sunk in yet, I'm very excited."

Miss Pickering said that she had been determined to not let the cancer disrupt her ambitions to study at a "good" university.

She said: "The illness had taken so much from my life, I didn't want it to take any more, these years determine your whole future and I didn't want it to jeopardise any more, I felt that would be even more unfair."

Miss Pickering said her ambition was to go into political journalism as well as to "grow her creative writing".