Exam boards have awarded 202,000 fewer top grades to GCSE candidates this year, as regulators attempt to reverse pandemic-era grade inflation.
The drop has been sharpest in England, where the share receiving grade 7 or above has fallen to 22%, down from 26% last year but up slightly from 21% in 2019.
The share of exams failed in England reached 2%, the highest failure rate since 2007. Failure rates in Wales, by contrast, have returned to levels last seen in 2018, while in Northern Ireland failure rates remain less than half their pre-pandemic level.
Regulators in Wales and Northern Ireland had opted to delay the full reversal of grade inflation until next year.
As a result, the share receiving top grades remains 3% above 2019 levels in Wales and 4% up in Northern Ireland.
The proportion receiving below grade 4/C in their English and maths GCSEs, which results in a mandatory resit, remains somewhat lower than pre-pandemic.
Just over a third of English students (35%) will need to resit, compared to 38% in 2019. Almost two-fifths of pupils failed their maths GCSE (39%), compared to 40% before the pandemic.
However, the results of a separate, standardised test taken by 13,000 students suggests that aptitude in English has in fact declined in recent years.
A third of students taking the National Reference Test failed to achieve grade 4 or above (33%) in English language, up from 30% in 2017 – a difference identified by regulator Ofqual as statistically significant.
Computing, statistics and business studies saw among the largest increases in student numbers compared to last year, while some languages saw steep declines in popularity.
The number of students taking GCSE French declined by 7%, while the number studying German fell by 15% and Irish by 29%.
Spanish bucked the trend with a 4% increase in student numbers, though that’s still smaller than the increase in the overall number of GCSEs taken (11%).
Inequalities have worsened
England’s reversal of grade inflation hasn’t impacted all regions equally.
The share receiving top grades in London, England’s best-performing region, remains 2.7 percentage points up from where it was in 2019.
That’s more than twice the increase seen in England’s worst-performing region, the North East, where the share receiving top grades is up just 1.2 percentage points compared to pre-pandemic.
Most of the counties in which the share of top grades remains significantly above 2019 levels are in the South East, though the Isle of Wight has seen the sharpest decrease of any county.
In Surrey, for instance, 31% of papers were graded 7 or above, up from just 21% in 2019. On the Isle of Wight, where 21% also received top grades in 2019, that figure has instead fallen to just 12%.
It’s a similar story with failure rates, which have risen significantly in the north (and Isle of Wight), while falling across much of the south.
Disparities have also widened between different school types.
Selective schools, which have long tended to outperform comprehensives, academies and independent schools, have seen the largest boost to top grades since 2018 – albeit a modest 0.8 percentage points.
That’s twice the increase seen by academies (0.4 percentage points).
Independent schools, which have historically outperformed all but selective schools, are the only type of institution to have seen their grades fall below pre-pandemic levels.
That marks a stark contrast to A-level results last week, where the share of students at independent schools receiving top grades was 2.7 percentage points up from 2019.
One educational inequality has narrowed this year.
The attainment gap between male and female students has fallen significantly, with 19.1% of boys achieving top grades compared to 24.9% for girls.
That’s a gap of 5.8%, compared to 7.4% last year and 6.5% in 2019.
One in four students are persistently absent from school
During the first term of this academic year, over 125,000 children spent more time absent from school than attending, according to figures from the Department for Education.
That includes almost 90,000 secondary school students, or one in every 36 (3%) – more than double the rate in autumn 2019.
And over the school year as a whole, more than a quarter of students (28%) missed over 10% of classes, double the rate in 2018-19.
On any given day, one in every 11 (9.3%) secondary school students were missing from class.
Students with a history of absence are significantly overrepresented among those who have to resit their English and maths GCSEs, according to a 2022 analysis by the Department for Education.
The analysis found that students who failed to achieve grade 9 to 4 in the core subjects have an average absence rate of 8.8%, compared to 3.7% among those who achieved grade 9 to 5 in both subjects.
Students with serious social, emotional and mental health issues have seen a particularly large increase in absence rates, which have risen from 12% to 18% over the last three years.
In July, a report by the thinktank Centre for Social Justice found that students absent for more than 10% of school days were more than three times more likely to commit a criminal offence by the age of 17 than those fully attending school.
Beth Prescott, one of the thinktank’s senior researchers, said: “We did a real in-depth absence inquiry in which we spoke to charities, local authorities, youth workers and others to ask what they were seeing.
“There were a number of reasons, but the one that came up consistently was anxiety and mental health – in particular, after the pandemic.
“It’s not just that these children weren’t going to school – they weren’t really leaving the house or their bedroom for anything. We also heard time and again about the length of time children were waiting for statutory services for help.
“We also heard about poverty being a factor – children who perhaps couldn’t afford the right uniform, or who didn’t have access to hygiene products and so just felt too embarrassed, or who hadn’t eaten that day or couldn’t afford the bus fare to get to school.”
Among those eligible for free school meals, one in seven (13.6%) were absent on any given day during the first term of this school year – almost twice the rate among their peers (7.3%), and up from 9.2% in autumn 2019.
Two in five (43%) missed more than 10% of classes, up from 28% in 2019, while one in 18 (5.6%) were away for the majority of school days.
The fall in school attendance has been driven by a rise in unauthorised absences, as well as a major increase in the number of students taking time off sick.
In June, Sky News revealed the number of council staff in England whose job it is to monitor school absences has been cut by nearly half in the past decade, making it harder for a lot of councils to track children down.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
