Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of trends in the level of attainment in (a) GCSE and (b) A-Level this year in England.

Ofqual have previously announced a planned and managed transition back to pre-COVID-19 pandemic grading arrangements, in recognition of the disruption that students experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, 2022 has been described as a transition year and overall, the results have reflected the policy intention for outcomes this year to be between 2019 and 2021. This year’s results are higher than in 2019 and lower than 2021, when teacher assessed grades were used as the method of assessment.

The Joint Council for Qualifications and Ofqual have published further breakdowns of results for GCSE and A levels according to gender, centre type and by region. At a regional level, the trends are broadly stable compared to previous years, with London and the South East having the highest proportion of entries for A level and GCSEs and achieving the highest grades. In 2022, girls continue to outperform boys at all grades overall for GCSEs and A levels.

Results by other pupil characteristics, including disadvantage, are not yet available for GCSEs or A levels. The department publishes this data in as timely a way as possible. This year, improvements to processing mean it is possible bring forward the publishing of this data from January 2023 to October 2022 for GCSEs, and to November 2022 for A levels.