Hundreds of thousands of teenagers who moved from primary to secondary school during the pandemic have received their GCSE results – with the gender gap for top grades persisting.
Nearly a quarter (24.5%) of girls achieved at least a grade 7 (A) compared to almost a fifth of boys (19.4%) – a 5.1 percentage point gap.
However, this is the closest the gap has been since 2000, when the earliest archive data is available.
It comes as 70.5% of girls were awarded at least a grade 4 (C) compared to 64.3% of boys – a 6.2 percentage point gap.
Cath Jadhav, vice president and responsible officer at GCSE providers Pearson, said the organisation views the gender gap as stable over the past few years and the decrease this time is fractions of a percentage point.
She said: “We don’t know the reasons for why that gap is narrowing… There will be lots of individual factors which affect that”
GCSEs used to be graded with a letter-based system but it began switching to a numbers-based system in 2017 – with 9 the highest and 1 the lowest.
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Total number of total grades slightly up
Overall, more than a fifth (21.9%) of UK teenagers who received their GCSE results were awarded a grade 7 (A) this summer.
The figure is a 0.1% percentage point increase compared to last year.
However, the number of teenagers who achieved what is considered to be a “standard pass” is down on last year – with 67.4% of entries getting at least a 4 (C) grade compared to 67.6% in 2024.
The exam results received by students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland today will them progress to sixth form, college or training.
Sir Ian Bauckham, chief regulator at Ofqual, England’s exams regulator, said: “The standard of work required to achieve a grade seven or a grade four at GCSE is the same this year as it was last year, and what we’re seeing is statistically insignificant changes at those key grades from last year to this year.
“That means basically that the underlying pattern, the underlying standard of performance amongst students from last year to this year, is stable.”
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On the gender gap, Sir Ian said: “What we see today in the results is a very small apparent narrowing of the gap in performance between boys and girls.
“It’s important for people to understand that there is still a gap in the performance of boys and girls, but what we can say is that it doesn’t appear to be growing at the moment.”
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