Arnav Singh, 16, scored 9s in all 12 GCSEs, 98% in English Literature, while playing county cricket, for St Olave's and for Bromley CC. His mum tells the story.
A 16-year-old from Bromley has come out of GCSE results day with a grade 9 in every one of his twelve subjects, and he did it while playing cricket for Kent at age-group level, for his school and for Bromley Cricket Club.
Arnav Singh, a pupil at St Olave’s Grammar School in Orpington, sat eleven GCSEs this summer, in biology, chemistry, physics, English literature, English language, mathematics, further mathematics, history, geography, Latin and computer science, and was awarded the top grade in all of them. His grade 9 in religious studies came a year early, in 2025. His results statement, shared with Bromley Online by his family, shows the marks behind three of them: 156 out of 160 in English literature, 155 out of 160 in further mathematics and 232 out of 240 in mathematics.
St Olave’s reported that eleven of its pupils were awarded a grade 9 in every subject they sat this year, in a year when 91.5% of the school’s grades came in at 9 to 7, the highest proportion of any Bromley school that published figures. Our Bromley GCSE results 2026 roundup has the borough picture.
The cricket
What sets Arnav apart is the timetable he did it on. His mother, Sunita Ahlawat, wrote to Bromley Online to describe a season in which a single match can take six to eight hours before travel, fitted around training, school fixtures and county commitments in the week.
He has represented Kent at age-group level and plays club cricket for Bromley Cricket Club. In the 2024 season he took 102 wickets across club and county cricket, a haul his school describes as “not only a county but also a national record for the most wickets in a single season” (St Olave’s Grammar School, 11 September 2024). Counting his school matches as well, his family put the season’s total at 126.
Corrected 9 September: this section previously gave the 2024 wicket totals as the family’s figures. The 102 wickets, and the record claim, are St Olave’s own account of the season.
Another feat is on the record. In May 2023, in Year 8, Arnav took four wickets in four consecutive balls, all bowled, for St Olave’s against Skinners’ in the third round of the Thomas Cup, and top-scored with 38 in the same match (St Olave’s Grammar School). Four in four is a double hat-trick, and it is rare at any level.
In his own words
Asked how the two fit together, Arnav said: “I love sports in general. It doesn’t always have to go my way, but I try to learn something at every turn. I try to stay positive, never turn down an opportunity and work hard. I think that same mindset translates nicely to my studies as well.”
He returns to St Olave’s this month for A-levels in further mathematics, mathematics, economics, history and computer science.
How rare is twelve 9s?
Rare enough that the exams regulator counts the pupils one by one. Ofqual’s guide to GCSE results for England in 2019 found 837 sixteen-year-olds who took seven or more reformed GCSEs and were awarded a grade 9 in every one of them. Broken down by the number of subjects taken, 10 of those pupils had sat twelve.
Ofqual’s infographic for GCSE results in 2022 gives the same table for a later year: of 2,193 sixteen-year-olds in England who scored a grade 9 in every subject they took, 13 had taken twelve or more.
Those are national counts for the whole of England, in double figures. Arnav’s twelve, alongside a county cricket season, is an unusual summer by any measure.
Corrected 8 September: this section previously described the 10 to 16 figure as the family’s reading of the data. It now cites the published Ofqual tables for 2019 and 2022, which show 10 pupils and 13 pupils respectively.
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