 Exam Hall - Public Domain - https://www.rawpixel.com/image/5803565 Well, it's that time of the year again when I get to have a trawl through the GCSE History results to see if there are any interesting trends. If you want to see previous entries in this series have a look at my blog on the 2024 results HERE and the pre-Covid years HERE. As ever, I am dividing this into a series of questions with an aim of exploring what this year's GCSE History results might reveal about some of the main history specifications on offer for GCSE in England. I will be addressing the following questions. Please do scroll down to what interests you. I have included my short takeaway answer as well as a longer analysis.
As ever, I am grateful for any comments or questions you might have, and am happy to chat further about any of this @apf102.bsky.social on Bluesky. Before we begin, I should say that, as an SHP Fellow, I am of course connected with the OCR History B (SHP) specification. That said, I and the SHP Fellows do not set the papers, this is done by OCR. The aim here (as you will hopefully see) is to offer an honest analysis of the results for HoDs and others interested in exploring the bigger picture of the history exams over the past few years. Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to AQA, who put all their data in XLS format online, and to Edexcel who kindly shared some of their own analyses. Q1: Are there any noticeable trends in entry numbers? A1: There was a small decline in History entries overall this year, which might be a sign of the recent growth in entries brought by EBacc finally ending. Edexcel continue to dominate History GCSE, increasing their market share out of the four big boards by half a percentage point despite declining absolute numbers. OCR B also saw greater market share this year, its first upward trend since 2018, increasing their share by 0.2 of a percentage point. OCR A continues its long decline, now down to just 2,635 entries (from 5,338 in 2018). AQA has also seen its market share fall again for the 3rd consecutive year, despite remaining strong in the overall rankings. Finally, Eduqas has held roughly steady after a number of years of post-Covid decline.  On the broad scale it looks like raw entry numbers for GCSE History have begun to decline. This continues a declining trend as a percentage of pupils entering GCSE history - roughly 34.8% of pupils taking History this year vs. 37.6% in 2024 and 38.5% in 2023. This i now lower than the 2019 entry of 36.3%. On a board by board basis, Edexcel continues to be extremely popular and remains the dominant board for market share, continuing to increase its market share overall to 57.5%. OCR B bucked its declining trend, rising slightly to a (still small) market share of 6%, it's best entry rate since 2020. OCR A is now a tiny entry at just 0.9% of market share, down from 2.2% in 2018. Interestingly both AQA and Eduqas have continued to lose market share, though not especially fast. AQA now sits around 32.3% from its high of 34.5% and Eduqas holds a 3.3% share, down from its Covid high of 4.2%. Q2: Which board got the best results? A2: This is not really a good question to ask. You can’t really answer it as results have a statistical link to the prior attainment of the exam board's specific cohort. BUT we can see that different boards seem to serve different cohorts. Both AQA and OCR A seem to attract cohorts with higher than average prior attainment. Meanwhile OCR B and Eduqas seem to pick up more pupils with lower prior attainment. This has no real bearing on anything but is interesting. Edexcel sits almost bang on the average.  As ever, this question is the one which tends to get asked but is actually a red herring. The distribution of grades per board is largely determined by the statistical connection to pupils’ prior attainment from KS2. This means that results distributions reflect the prior attainment of the entries more than anything else. So, what we can probably say is that centres doing OCR A tend to have cohorts with higher prior attainment and that therefore a greater proportion of higher grades can be awarded. You can clearly see that OCR A have almost double the number of Grade 9s for instance. AQA also seems to be over represented in the higher grade range, again suggesting higher prior attainment cohorts. Overall, Edexcel centres seem to sit most closely on the national average for prior attainment (by inference), with OCR B and Eduqas centres slightly below. There’s not a vast amount in it, but it might explain a little about the grade boundaries we see later. Q3: Which exams were the most and least accessible? A3: It’s complex but papers continue to be much less accessible than their pre-2018 counterparts. You also have to bear in mind that some boards have cohorts with higher prior attainment than others, which are likely to impact the grade boundaries also. With the exception of Eduqas however, all papers seem to have been a little more accessible this year. As I have shown previously though, this does vary over time and by module. On the whole, papers are becoming more accessible and this is something you might want to think about if deciding between boards.  This is where things get quite interesting. Although it is impossible to say which boards get the best results, we can make some inferences about which boards have the most and least accessible exams. To do this we can look at the raw marks required for each grade boundary. Because the grade distribution is a (mostly) statistically tied variable for each board, the marks required give some sense of how easy or hard pupils found the papers. To put it another way: if around 65% of pupils are expected to pass at Grade 4 or higher, then the raw mark boundaries need to be adjusted to get as close to this as possible. If pupils find the papers accessible then they are more likely to do well and therefore grade boundaries will need to rise to ensure the correct grade distribution. If pupils find the exams hard / inaccessible, then the grade boundaries will need to come down for the same reason. Seemingly oddly then, high grade boundaries actually suggest a more accessible exam. Low grade boundaries the opposite. Now working all of this out is actually quite tricky as GCSE History has a phenomenal number of paper combinations and therefore grade boundaries. AQA alone had 156 possible combinations of papers and therefore 156 different sets of grade boundaries. Compare this to most subjects, which have 1 or 2 combinations and you get an idea of the challenge. Boards do not release the numbers of pupils who sat each combination so arriving at an overall grade boundary average is technically impossible. For the purposes of this study I have had to average across all the different options, which is a bit of a fudge. If you look at the chart you can see that there are some big differences. Using our measure, Edexcel comes out at the most accessible exam across all grade boundaries with pupils at Grade 7 requiring 74% of the marks compared to Eduqas' 55% and AQA's 57%. This is a significant difference and suggests that the pupils taking Edexcel found it easier to answer the questions than those taking AQA and Edquas. However, if we factor in the lower prior attainment of the Eduqas cohort and the higher prior attainment of the AQA one, then our inferences get more interesting still. This would suggest pupils taking AQA, despite their higher average starting points, found the papers extremely hard. Both of the OCR papers sit somewhere in the middle, though again, OCR A has a higher attaining cohort and OCR B a lower attaining one. At Grade 4, a crucial point, the difference is still pronounced, with Edexcel pupils requiring just over half the marks (51%), whereas AQA pupils needed only slightly over 1/3 of the marks to gain the grade. Although this is a 30% difference in difficulty, the gap is smaller than last year, when it stood at 42% difference. Again the OCR papers sit somewhere in the middle, though the higher prior attainment of OCR A would suggest that the grade boundaries should exceed Edexcel's. Similarly the lower prior attainment of OCR B pupils fits reasonably well with where the grade boundary sits. These kinds of differences matter on a psychological level. Pupils who feel they are doing well on a paper and able to answer a good portion of it are likely to keep going. Where pupils feel they are struggling with lots of questions, they are more likely to give up. Kudos to Edexcel here whose grade boundaries have continued to show a trend towards higher marks required since 2019. If we look right down at Grade 1 we can see that AQA pupils were gaining a grade when picking up just 6% of the marks - just 9 actual marks over their papers! All boards except Eduqas have done slightly better this year in terms of bucking the trend of low grade boundaries. There was a significant bump up especially in the grade boundaries for OCR B, which is now moving back towards the middle of the pack. Again, it is worth noting that OCR B grade boundaries are likely to be lower than other boards due to their lower prior attainment profile.  Looking back to 2019, most boards have moved in a positive direction in terms of accessibility. The one exception is OCR B, whose papers were more accessible in 2019, even though they have moved in a more positive direction this year. However, compare all this to 2017, when the percentage of marks required for the old Grade G were upwards 20-23%, and you can see we have a long way to go to make these exams accessible for all (3-8). Last year I did some unit by unit analysis, but I am afraid that took hours. If you want to see last years' you can do so HERE.  Concluding thoughts
Thanks so much for reading this far. I hope this tentative analysis is of some use to people as they start heading back to work and thinking about the GCSE results. As ever, if you have any questions, or just want to chat exams, please drop give me a shout on Bluesky Alex Ford (@apf102.bsky.social) — Bluesky For more of my blogs on exams why not try: Dealing with the disease: The urgent need for exam reform (andallthat.co.uk) Examinations: The Gilded Age (andallthat.co.uk)
1 Comment
11/15/2025 01:09:27 am
When I was preparing for my last exam, a grade calculator final helped me understand exactly what score I needed. It made planning my study schedule more realistic because I knew what to aim for. Tools like a grade calculator final are great for reducing anxiety before major exams. It’s definitely something I’ll keep using each semester. Leave a Reply. |
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