The dust has now settled after GCSE results day, and we were busy as always putting out our analysis on the day. But there’s lots of interesting data that wasn’t published on the day. So far, for example, there have been no official figures on pupils achieving the basics: that is, achieving a standard pass in both English and maths.
But using figures collected from schools participating in FFT’s Early Results Service, we’re able to bring you an early look at the pupils who did not achieve the basics last year.
Data
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This post will use data submitted to FFT’s Early Results Service. It comes from just under 1,500 schools and more than 270,000 pupils – roughly half the cohort.
When we’ve compared the results of this type of early analysis with actual national figures once they’re published, we’ve found that our figures tend to be very close to the national figures overall, but can be more variable when we look at breakdowns by pupil group. Please do bear this in mind when interpreting the rest of the post.
A basic look at the basics
Before we get started, a note on how we’ll be defining the basics. Here, when we refer to ‘achieving the basics’, we mean achieving a grade 4 or above GCSE maths, and in either GCSE English literature or GCSE English language.
In our sample, 33.2% of pupils did not achieve the basics last year. This compares to 33.5% of state-funded mainstream schools in 2023/24, according to DfE figures.
This chart below shows how this breaks down by pupil group.
Boys were more likely to fail to achieve the basics than girls (34.4% vs 31.8% of girls), but the gender gap is far smaller than the disadvantage gap. More than half (52.2%) of FSM6 pupils did not achieve the basics compared to just 27.8% of their peers.
The gender gap in grading closed slightly in GCSEs this year, and this does seem to be reflected in these figures: last year’s official figures showed a gap of 4.0 percentage points, compared to just 2.5 percentage points this year according to our figures.
Grading for those who didn’t achieve the basics
Let’s take a closer look at the pupils that didn’t achieve the basics, starting with the grades that they did achieve in English and maths.
The majority of pupils who did not achieve the basics were closer to doing so. 52.9% achieved at least a grade 3 in both subjects.
Pupils who passed one subject
Finally, let’s look at the grades of pupils who achieved a grade 4 in either English or maths, but not the other.
Overall, these pupils were more likely to have achieved a grade 4 in English than maths, which probably reflects the fact that the English grade is the best of English literature and English language, while the maths grade is based on one GCSE.
However, when broken down by gender we see that female pupils were far less likely to pass maths but not English than their male peers.
We can also look at the grades pupils achieved in the subject in which they got a grade 4 or above.
Among pupils who got grade 4 or above in maths, 9.1% achieved a grade 6 or above, compared to 14.1% of those who got grade 4 or above in English.
Summing up
The data from our sample suggests that the percentage of pupils not achieving the basics is virtually unchanged from last year: there’s a very small decrease of 0.3 percentage points. The national figures published on results day included figures for English and maths GCSEs separately, and these also showed little change in those not achieving a grade 4 or higher: an increase of 0.6 percentage points in English and 0.1 percentage points in maths. While our sample shows a decrease and the national figures an increase, both are very close to zero.
There does seem to have been a narrowing in the gender gap this year. Again, this does reflect what we’ve seen in the published figures.
As always, we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for the DfE’s next release of data in the autumn and will bring you our insights once more national data is published.
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I just wanted to check something, at the start of this post you state that ‘the basics: that is, achieving a strong pass in both English and maths.’ but later in the post you say that ‘the basics is refer to ‘achieving the basics’, we mean achieving a grade 4 or above GCSE maths, and in either GCSE English literature or GCSE English language.’ Therefore, I think the statement in the first paragraph might need clarifying as I believe a ‘strong pass’ generally means a grade 5 and above rather than a grade 4
Thanks Pauline, that is confusing so I’ve edited the first paragraph to read ‘standard pass’ as ‘strong pass’ does mean a grade 5 or above. ‘The basics’ is sometimes used to refer to standard passes and sometimes strong passes, hence the confusion! But to be clear, in this post we’re looking at standard passes, ie grade 4 and above.
It would be really helpful to have the actual %s to go with the graphs. The graphs give a very useful quick visual comparison but to do some more detailed data comparisons with our schools against ‘FFT national’, I really need the specific values. This would be extremely useful information (and apologies because this applies to a lot of blogs, not just this specific one).