Students in England gained record levels of top grades in this year’s A-level exams, driven by young men producing their strongest performances outside the pandemic years.
Ofqual, the exam regulator for England, shrugged off any suggestions of grade inflation, pointing to the lower proportion of 18-year-olds taking A-levels and saying that fewer low-achieving students had entered.
Despite the overall improvement, regional variations remain, with students in the West Midlands and north-east England recording lower grades overall than in 2024. The north-east remains the only region of England with average grades below pre-pandemic levels.
Among the more than 1.1m entries in England, 28.2% gained an A or A* grade, while 9.4% gained the top A* grade, both higher than in 2024 when 27.6% of entries got A and A*s and 9.3% gained A*s.
Across all students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 28.3% of entries were awarded an A or A* grade, up by 0.5 percentage points on last year. Wales was the only country of the three to see a drop in the proportion of top grades awarded compared with last year, falling from 29.9% to 29.5%.
Other than in 2020, 2021 and 2022, when awards were affected by changes to assessments caused by Covid-19, the proportion of top grades in England was higher than any year since the A* grade was introduced in 2010, and before that going back to 2001.
Ian Bauckham, Ofqual’s chief regulator responsible for England’s results, said: “Standards have been maintained for another year, with grades determined by students’ performance in exams using exam boards’ strict marking and grading processes.”
Bauckham noted that the number of entries were down compared with last year, despite the increased numbers of 18-year-olds in the population, and said a “smaller, smarter cohort” was taking A-levels this year.
“This may be a sign that young people are making different choices about what types of qualification suit them, which then has an impact on A-level outcomes,” Bauckham said.
Young men outpaced women in the proportion of entries with the two top grades, with 28.4% compared with 28% for women in England, reversing the positions of previous years. The improved performance – which belies recent complaints of boys being “left behind” by the school system – was more extreme among sixth-formers, where 9.9% of entries by young men gained A*s compared with 9.1* for women.
The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing regions widened further, with 32.1% of entries in London gaining A*-A, compared with 22.9% in north-east England.
Jill Duffy, the chief executive of the OCR examination board, said: “Regional inequalities are getting worse, not better. The gap at top grades [A*-A] has grown again. London is once again the top-performing region and is now 9.2 percentage points ahead of the north-east.
“The north-east is the only region in England where the proportion of A* and A grades is down on both last year and 2019. The picture is slightly brighter at A*-C, with a smaller gap between regions. These regional inequalities need more attention.”
The Ucas university admissions administrator said record numbers of 18-year-olds in the UK got a place at university or college for this autumn. The A-level, BTec and T-level results showed 255,130 had been accepted, compared to 243,650 in 2024, a rise of 4.7%.
