[Lauren]

This is why FE colleges with vocational routes are very important - although they have an examination element, they also take into account the indvidual and determination through hard work to allow someone to get far, despite them not being able to vomit facts like a robot (which, generally, most exams require despite this not showing any real intellect).

Red's advice is sound - do it for yourself, but also do it to throw it back in the face of anyone who thought you couldn't do it - and this is the one of the main things that I personally attribute to me getting into University.

From primary school they thought I had dyscalculia whereby I couldn't do maths - at all. I passed my maths GCSE just to show them that with the right encouragement on their part I could have gained even higher.
Then, I was in hospital during my AS levels so every single one of my teachers lowered my predicted A Level grades to CCC and below - so on results day when I got ABB(last was a C but coursework is being remarked as it was 2 marks off) not only did I feel proud of myself but I felt happy that I was able to show teachers that sometimes encouragement is all it takes.

(Actually... I'll quickly outline a sociological study done on this; they found that if they made pupils take fake mock tests and then randomly selected 50% of students and told the teacher that those were the ones that were going to pass because of their "mock" scores - the teachers showed them more encouragement and it turns out that despite being randomly selected they all were the top achievers in the forthcoming examinations).

I appear to have gone off on a tangent here - but the moral of my story is this: Don't let anyone make you believe you can't do something, because all that means is they've given you ground to prove them wrong.