It’s GCSE results day 2024!
First and foremost, we’d like to take a moment to congratulate everybody who took part in GCSE and A-Level testing 2024, from students and teachers to SENCos, exams officers and teaching assistants: this is your moment. To anybody who received results today, you’ve done yourselves proud.
💡 Why not enjoy some free carbs to celebrate your achievement?
Results-wise, it’s been a year of high top-of-the-table achievement and some worryingly widening gaps. In this blog we’ll be taking a look at the raw results, exploring the national data, and interrogating grade shifts, educational inequalities and the signs of post-pandemic educational recovery for the class of 2024.
Let’s dive in!
10 things worth knowing
about GCSE results 2024...
#1: Top grades are up!
The proportion of students achieving a top grade GCSE is up by almost 1%. That’s a deceptively big shift: this year, 22.6% of marks came in at between a Grade 7 and a Grade 9, which is higher than the amount of top grades awarded pre-pandemic in 2019.
The proportion of Grade 9 results also came in slightly higher than in 2023, with a 0.1% increase. So we’re looking at some very smart cookies in the class of 2024… but things don’t quite look as hopeful when we shift our attention away from the top of the table.
#2: The big news is that English and Maths pass rates are down.
Grades are broadly similar to last year, but the percentage of pupils achieving a Grade 4 pass in English and Maths has fallen compared to 2023. This is the news that’s been making the headlines this morning, and it’s got a fair portion of the educational establishment feeling a little bit worried, especially around generational skills gaps.
#3: 28.8% of students didn’t get a Grade 4 pass in English...
That’s huge when we consider that it’s a compulsory subject, and it reveals that there’s a startling number of students in the UK who don’t have pass-level reading and writing skills. Are we headed for a long-term low literacy problem across the top end of the Covid generation—and what does this mean for things like their future employment prospects?
#4: …And that means well over a million UK students are looking at an English re-sit.
Educators have taken to social media this morning to voice their concerns about the system’s capacity for the number of English and Maths re-sits that are going to go ahead in the next twelve months, citing class sizes and logistics as points of concern. It’s also going to delay those million learners in heading to their post-16 destinations—which could really impact them financially if they were planning on taking up an apprenticeship or paid work.
#5: English re-sit pass levels are far lower than we’d like them to be.
In 2023, only 26% of those students re-sitting English achieved a Grade 4 pass or above. We don’t have solid re-sit entry data yet, but if we take a look at 17-year-old students in summer 2024’s results (the extra year of age being a good early data indicator that the learner is re-sitting), around 80% of them also failed to achieve a Grade 4 pass or above. This means that there’s a huge need for reading support in the UK, and millions of learners who need extra help to achieve exam-level confidence and skills.
💡(…We might know of something that could help with that.)
#6: There are some HUGE regional disparities in England’s grades.
Catherine McKinnell, the schools minister, said that GCSE results 2024 show “unacceptable, entrenched regional disparities we have seen time and time again”. She’s not wrong: this year, 28.5% of grades issued in London were a Grade 7 or above, compared to just 17.8% in the North East of England.
#7: And it’s prompted a lot of talk about barriers to opportunity.
A number of commentators have pointed out that the areas with the highest child poverty and lowest social mobility are reporting the lowest proportion of top grades. In two regions, the proportion of top grades dramatically decreased: in the East of England, they fell by 2.3%, and in the East Midlands by 1.1%.
“That is why we are committed to breaking down barriers to opportunity – including by delivering a broader, richer curriculum – and ensuring that young people in all corners of our country can reach their potential,” commented new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson this morning.
#8: Private schools are still dominating the top of the table.
2024 has also seen the achievement gap between academies and independent schools grow in terms of bagging top grades. Nearly half of entries from private schools achieved a Grade 7 or above, compared to 21.2% in academy settings—which is a staggering 27.2 percentage point gap. It’s further fuel on the fire when it comes to the new government’s ongoing conversations about poverty and educational outcomes.
#9: Subject-level differences in attainment remain, but are stable.
There have only been minimal shifts when we look at the subject breakdown of Grade 9-4 pass rates in 2023 and 2024, and they’re still largely in line with what we saw pre-pandemic in 2019. Physics, Biology and Chemistry still have the highest 9-4 and 7-4 pass rates, with English Language and English Literature coming in at the middle of the table. History, Design Technology, Computer Science and Double-Award Science trail the pack for the fewest 9-4 Grades achieved.
In terms of entry trends, we’ve seen a huge uptick in learners taking Statistics and a moderate decline in those taking Drama or Performing Arts.
#10: And there’s some interesting input from the National Reference Test, too.
The NRT is a pre-GCSE selective test introduced in 2017 to provide independent evidence about whether standards in English and Maths are improving over time. At its introduction, it was said that it may potentially be used as evidence to adjust GCSE grade boundaries to reflect any differences—although this has never been done.
2024’s NRT data corroborates what we’ve seen from the raw data about literacy standards and struggles in passing English subjects with a Grade 4 or above. It reveals a fall in performance in English Language, meaning that those worries we have about literacy skills are concerning on a progress level too—meaning that we’ve got work to do when it comes to fostering fluency, reading independence, and an exam-ready standard of literacy.
What about A-level results in 2024?
Top grades are up again!
The big news from A-Level results 2024 is that like GCSEs, top grades are up.
9.3% of A-Level entries received an A* compared to 8.6% in 2023. 27.6% achieved an A or an A*, which is again an increase on 26.5% in 2023. And 4,136 students who took 3 A-Levels achieved a full set of A*s, up by over 300 from 3,822 last August.
It’s heartening to see after a number of years where it’s been far harder for learners to excel, due to remote education arrangements and pandemic learning loss—these are the learners who took their GCSEs in 2022, the first year after the pandemic where exams went ahead, and saw a lot of pandemic disruption to their late-stage learning, so it’s a good news story.
The view from the rest of the table
It’s good: these are the best A-Level results since 2010.
The overall A*-C pass rate appears to be fairly stable between 2023 and 2024, coming in at 76.0% on 2023’s 75.4%. It’s the same story when we take a quick look at the A*-E pass rate too, with just a small decline from 97.2% in 2023 to 97.1% in 2024.
In terms of subject choices, former humanities students might be disappointed to note that the trend towards STEM continues, with fewer learners choosing subjects like English, History and Art overall, and fewer choosing to combine them with STEM subjects, reportedly as a result of the Gove-era changes to AS-Levels. Molly Morgan Jones, Director of Policy at the British Academy commented that this slump in humanities uptake is going to have a negative impact and “knock-on effects, not only for these subjects in UK universities but also on the skills young people take out into the workforce and the wider world.”
…Before we pop the champagne, let’s talk inequalities again.
Again, the gap between state and private school results has widened. Exams data for 2024’s A-Level takers shows that the gulf in attainment of grades C and above is the biggest since 2018 when current data began. And remember that big uptick in As and A*s a few paragraphs ago? In total, 49.4% of A-Level entries at independent schools were awarded an A or above in 2024, compared to less than a quarter at both comprehensive schools (22.3%) and academies (26.5%).
We already know that the cost of living crisis is having a huge impact on students in the lower half of the economic table and their decision to go to university, and larger difficulties in obtaining top grades add another layer of disadvantage to overcome for learners when compared to their more affluent peers. In the UK, it’s still a degree-level education that is economically associated with liveable salaries and longest life expectancy, so there are wide-reaching implications that extend far beyond the lecture hall too.
So it’s been a bit of a mixed bag of a year.
We have huge signs of recovery from pandemic-era learning slumps and changes to grading systems. Which is great!
…But the thing that underpins it all is a sense that some schools are recovering better than others, there are far too many learners not achieving Grade 4 passes, and that attainment is impacted by a student’s material circumstances in a bigger way than it might have been in the previous decade. That’s a big consideration for any teachers who work in SEND too, where the demographic has already been seriously negatively impacted by things like pandemic learning loss and budget shortfalls—and it’s leading educators all over the UK to question if we’re really creating the most nurturing spaces for SEND learners to achieve their goals and dreams in.
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