GCSE results day for Teesside schoolchildren
A Middlesbrough businesswoman is offering advice after she didn't get the grades she wanted and left school at 16
A Teesside woman who left school at 16 is reassuring schoolchildren to not be too disheartened at their results as it's not the end of the world.
Hundreds and thousands of GCSE pupils are finding out what they got today.
Michelle Sheekey is from Middlesbrough and she says she didn't get the grades she wanted but has succeeded in life as she's a director of two companies.
She says you can still make something in life and said: "At the time, I just wanted to go and work on a cruise ship and be a hairdresser. I've never been a hairdresser, I've never been on a cruise ship but that's what I wanted to do. But then after leaving school on the Friday, I went and got an office junior job in a law firm four days later to make the tea and the coffee and answer the telephone. I actually found I loved working in that environment.
"It's not the end of the world. If you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, yeah, your grades are important. But I don't think your grades define who you are. I've lived it, my youngest daughter's lived it as she didn't get the grades that she wanted but my older daughter did.
"I just think if you have a work ethic and inside that you want to do well, you're going to. Not everybody's academic and that's okay. It's okay not to be academic. It doesn't mean to say any less than somebody that is, it just means that you're skill set in a different area, you know, and you're going to excel in a different area.
"You've got to be prepared to work hard. Nothing worth having is easy to get. You've got to be prepared to make mistakes. You've got to be prepared to ask lots and lots of questions and you've got to know that you've got to fall down. Everybody falls down in life and it's just having that ability to keep getting back up.
"I think the difficulty is knowing what you want to do and I think that stops a lot of people because they don't have the answer but my advice is try it. You don't need to make this final decision about what the rest of your life is going to be like. Try it if you don't like it. Try something else until you find the fit that sort of lights your fire because once your fire is lit there's no stopping you.
"For youngsters leaving school now, I personally think it's more difficult now because I think there's more pressure on everybody to be perfect and have this perfect for social media. We didn't have social media back in 1984 so don't worry so much about other people's opinions. If you stay true to yourself, I think you'll go far."