This is the tenth year in which the Education Policy Institute has published analysis and commentary on the day young people in England receive their GCSE and level 1/2 technical award results. Those years have seen a wide range of issues shape how we interpret what pupils are studying and the outcomes they achieve.
Looking back, the introduction of Progress 8 to assess school performance from 2016 provided a greater focus on a range of core subjects than the long standing “five good GCSE” measures. The rollout of new GCSEs from 2017 saw the end of letters as grades, with students, schools and the wider economy adjusting to a world in which a 4 (equivalent to a C or above) became a so called “standard pass” and a 5 became a “strong pass”.
And, of course, the disruption of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 that saw examinations dropped completely along with the algorithm intended to help set grades in their absence. Centre- and then teacher-assessed grades led to increases in pass rates that, as we argued at the time, were not unexpected.
Over the course of 2022 and 2023, those effects were unwound with grade distributions returned to 2019 levels. The distribution of grades in 2023 looked like 2019, and in turn 2024 looked much like 2023.
So, in terms of results day, 2025 could be considered something of a period of relative stability in GCSEs themselves. There have been no fundamental changes to qualifications, students have taken exams as expected, and there have been no significant changes to course content or assessment arrangements (other than the continued use of formula sheets in mathematics, physics, and combined science). As a result, we are likely to see an overall grade distribution that isn’t too dissimilar to what we have seen for the past two years.
But that is not to say there aren’t things we need to keep in mind as we look at this year’s results.
Last year’s results saw an ongoing narrowing of the gap between boys and girls – though girls remain well ahead at both the grade 4 and grade 7 boundaries. We know from our work looking at learning loss and recovery during and after the pandemic, that girls seemed to have been more affected than boys.
This year’s cohort was in the final year of primary school when the pandemic hit. They didn’t sit key stage 2 (KS2) assessments and had their opening terms in secondary school disrupted by closures to in-school teaching.
The lack of KS2 assessments has two implications for this year’s results and how they are used.
Firstly, exam boards are normally able to use KS2 data as evidence of whether we would expect to see differences in attainment between cohorts and whether there should be a corresponding change in grade boundaries. It’s important to remember that this is only one part of the grading puzzle, and that changes to KS2 assessment in the past – most notably in 2016, the first set of the results against the new national curriculum – have presented similar challenges.
An alternative way to track the performance of individual cohorts is the national reference test in English and maths which is sat by a representative sample of students in around 300 schools. These results are directly comparable over time and last year’s results – while not leading to any changes in the grade distribution – showed that outcomes in English had fallen below pre-pandemic levels. In mathematics, performance at both grade 4 and above, and grade 7 and above, remained below pre-pandemic levels but showed signs of recovery.
The second impact of having no KS2 assessments concerns how schools are assessed when school-level performance data is published in the autumn. The headline measure, Progress 8, relies on comparing pupils with similar prior attainment. This year and next, with no such data available, the Department for Education has said it will continue to publish historic Progress 8 measures, but in practice we are likely to see a greater focus on attainment, such as the percentage of pupils achieving a strong pass in English and mathematics. This will make things more challenging for schools with a disproportionate number of pupils with low prior attainment: they may secure good rates of progress for those pupils, but their raw outcomes are likely to remain relatively low.
More fundamental changes to accountability are also on the horizon.
Over the next academic year, we expect to see the introduction of a new Ofsted inspection framework, and the rollout of school report cards. Earlier this year, the Department for Education consulted on accountability and intervention, including a proposal for new school profiles to provide a more rounded understanding of what a school is doing. We can expect this to feature in the forthcoming white paper.
Finally, we await the highly anticipated report and recommendations from the Curriculum and Assessment review. While the theme for the review throughout has been “evolution not revolution”, the interim report highlighted several challenges suggesting the system is not working well for all.
All of these have the potential to shape what students study in the years ahead.
