Pupils excel as results are sent out

do not define you as a person. If you tried your best then no one can ask for more.

“Bill Gates said ‘I failed in some subject exams, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft’.”

And St John’s RC Academy in Perth tweeted: “Well done to all our candidates - you’ve produced record-breaking results this year.

“Hope you are having a great day, and remember there’s #nowrongpath”

Education secretary John Swinney, who is the MSP for Perthshire North, said: “Congratulations to the pupils who have worked so hard and achieved so much this year.

“These are a strong set of results which show a degree of year-on-year variation expected in a high-performing education system with credible assessment.

“I am pleased to see an overall rise in the pass rate for national five with increases in passes for maths and English.

“At higher level we have seen a welcome upturn in the collective number of passes for the sciences - something we have focused our efforts on for some time.”

However, another Perthshire politician, Liz Smith MSP, was less impressed.

The Conservative spokesperson on education said pupils achieved their exam results “in spite of Scotland’s schools system, not because of it.”

She added: “In some key core subjects – including history and some modern languages – there is a marked drop in the number of entries.

“And in many subjects, we also see attainment falling, particularly at advanced higher level.

“The fundamental problems remain the same.

“We have too few teachers in classrooms. And, as the Sutton Trust recently declared, we have a school system that doesn’t give enough children the opportunity to really excel and push on.”