This year’s GCSE results in England delivered something that teachers and policymakers had craved in recent years: stability, at least for most 16-year-olds.
Covid and its aftermath had sent GCSE results seesawing until this summer, when results were more similar to the previous year than at any time since the pandemic struck in 2020.
Grades for 16-year-olds in England have nudged up, but a microscope is needed to see some of the changes since last summer, such as the shrinking attainment gap between boys and girls, or the slight decline in English and maths results. The variations are fractional compared with what came before.
As the tide of disruption recedes, however, it exposes the broken legacy of a policy introduced by Michael Gove more than a decade ago, of forcing students who fail to achieve at least a grade 4 in GCSE maths and English to resit the qualifications while they remain in education.
Until 2019 the policy, along with reforms to GCSE formats and grading, led to fewer resits being required, especially among disadvantaged pupils. That has now reversed, and the number forced into retakes has gone up. There were 346,000 entries in English and maths GCSEs by students aged 17 to 19 this year, compared with fewer than 300,000 in 2024.
Just one in six for the older age group passed maths this year, and only one in 100 got top grades. Among the 19-year-olds disappointed this year will be some who sat GCSE maths for the third time after failing to achieve a grade 4 “standard pass” in 2023 or 2024, leading educators and experts to become increasingly critical of the resit policy.
Jill Duffy, the chair of the Joint Council for Qualifications and chief executive of the OCR examination board, said nearly a quarter of GCSE maths and English entries were now resits, an all-time high.
“This is a resit crisis. Tinkering at the edges of policy won’t fix this,” she said.
Prof Ulrike Tillmann, the chair of the Royal Society’s education committee, said: “History shows that two-thirds of GCSE resit students do not achieve the required grade by age 19, and we cannot let this pattern continue.
“Repeated resits create huge pressures on teachers, schools and colleges, not to mention the emotional strain on students forced to retake an exam that does not serve them. We must question whether the maths content these students are studying meets their needs.”
Duffy agreed that a closer look at maths and English was needed across the secondary curriculum. “When we’ve looked at scripts for those students who aren’t getting grade 4, what’s really clear is that there are fundamental skills they should have been getting much earlier in key stage 3, if not earlier,” she said.
She envisions changes to the two subjects, to reduce “overcrowding” in maths by stripping out topics such as trigonometry and to make the English qualification more relevant.
“When we look at GCSE English, I would say it is universally unpopular. I haven’t met a student or teacher who likes it,” she said. “We really need to look at that and we need to add more modern relevant texts so we’re making it more relevant and more engaging for young people today.”
Change may be on the way. The government has commissioned a national curriculum review for England, which is expected to report later this year. One of the key points among its interim findings will be “considering the impact of current performance measures on young people’s choices and outcomes” – a hint that the built-in cycle of failure may be ending.
