GCSE Revisioned

Geoff Wake, Professor of Education

Today’s GCSE results show that 72% of 16-year-old students in England obtained a GCSE Mathematics grade 4 or above (what counts as a ‘standard pass’).  This is down from the 78% at the peak of the teacher-assessed grades during the pandemic, but fractionally up from the pre-pandemic 2019 results. 

This year the pass rate was marginally higher (0.4 percentage points) for male students compared to female students, but the percentage of students getting grade 7 or higher was notably higher for male students (22.5%) compared to female students (20%) – a gap that has widened since before the pandemic.

At a time when we have a new government that has announced a wide-ranging curriculum review, and this year’s GCSE results are reported, it’s worth taking time to think about how such data might help us think about the former.

The media coverage that surrounds ‘results day’ tends to acknowledge the hard work of students and teachers that the results represent, however, there are also individual cases and pockets of disappointment – and there are many, too many, of these. 

While 72% of 16-year-olds in England achieved grade 4 or above this year, only 17.4% of the students aged 17 and above achieved a standard pass – that’s 32,300 out of 185,700 in raw numbers.   Given that current policy is that all those in education who get below grade 4 must resit (or work towards) GCSE Mathematics, there were tens of thousands of disappointed resit students this morning.

Some of our recent research at Nottingham has focused on what we might do to improve the mathematical experience of GCSE resit students. The wider lives of such students has recently been considered by researchers drawing on data of the Millennium Cohort Study.

A working paper from UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies was reported recently in a Guardian article and made me pause for thought and seek out the working paper. There is a lot to ponder: basically, the report suggests that low grades in GCSE Maths and/or English lead to poorer life chances than might otherwise be the case. In other words that there is not just correlation, but also causation. It is the low grades that make the difference.

Youngsters with low grade outcomes in both Maths and English are more likely to have multiple issues such as hyperactivity behaviour problems, have experienced teenage pregnancy and have longstanding illnesses.

This might make us wonder, “As maths teachers/educators what are we doing to resolve this?” Surely, there is something wrong with the curriculum. Here, I suggest that we consider the curriculum in its widest sense as well as in the detail of the maths curriculum more specifically; and importantly in the assessment models we have for both the curriculum in general and more particularly for the mathematics curriculum.

In our own research in this area, focused on GCSE resits, the Mastering Maths programme, although having a primary outcome measure of improved GCSE scores, we consider in some detail students’ experiences. It is our contention that we might better engage GCSE resit students with meaningful mathematical activity by providing them with opportunities to collaborate on carefully designed tasks that provide challenge in ways that allow them to confront long held misconceptions.

We have some evidence that this approach does indeed work in ways that changes classroom dynamics and leads to more efficacious and confident young people who improve their GCSE scores. Our next stage of this research, an EEF effectiveness study, is about to start and we hope that this will provide more insight in this important area of mathematics teaching and learning.

It is our hope that the curriculum review will look beyond the headline data and consider the important detail about how students actually engage with mathematics, and give weight to those who are disadvantaged by the current system.

Author information

Based in the Observatory for Mathematical Education at the University of Nottingham, Geoff is leading the Mastering Maths programme. 

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