GCSE results by region: what England’s 2026 figures show

By Yoosuf Nadat20 September 20268 min read

Figures from summer 2026. GCSE results are published each August; this article will be reviewed when the next set lands.

Where the 2026 results landed

Among 16-year-olds sitting GCSEs in London in summer 2026, 30.2% of results came out at grade 7 or above. For the North East, the share was 19.0%.

Between those two regions lies a spread of 11.2 percentage points, the largest regional gap anywhere in the available record. Ofqual’s separate all-ages table for England gives London 28.6% and the North East 17.7%, a 10.9 point spread rather than 11.2, yet counted that way too, no gap has been wider since the series started in 2010. The gap stood at 10.6 points in 2025. In 2019, the last summer before the pandemic, it was 9.3.

A difference between the regions has existed for a long time. The point of interest in 2026 is that it has kept on widening.

Every region, side by side

Below are Ofqual’s figures for 16-year-olds in England, giving the share of results in each region graded 7 or above:

Grade 7 or above, 16-year-olds in England, summer 2026. Source: Ofqual, Table 19b. London in gold.

Share of GCSE results graded 7 or above among 16-year-olds in England, by region, summer 2026. Source: Ofqual, Table 19b.
Region	Grade 7+
London	30.2%
South East	25.8%
East of England	23.1%
South West	22.2%
Yorkshire and the Humber	20.6%
North West	20.1%
West Midlands	19.7%
East Midlands	19.4%
North East	19.0%
England average	23.1%

Across England as a whole, the average came to 23.1%.

Read down the list and two patterns appear. London does more than top it: its lead over the South East, in second, is 4.4 points, which is wider than the distance from second place down to eighth. Below that, the seven regions from Yorkshire downward sit within 1.6 points of one another. So the picture is closer to “London versus everywhere” than to “north versus south”.

FFT Education Datalab pointed to one more detail that is easy to miss. Of all the English regions, only London has 2026 results at grade 7 and above that sit perceptibly higher than its 2019 level. Everywhere else has broadly come back to where it began.

Why the headline figure needs care

First, the number shifts with the table you take it from. Ofqual reports regional results in two forms. Table 19a is the all-ages version: it counts every candidate entered that summer, so it takes in post-16 students resitting Maths and English, private candidates and adults. Table 19b is limited to 16-year-olds, the group taking GCSEs at the usual age. Figures in 19b come out higher. The resitters counted in 19a lean towards students retaking after a grade 3 or below, and they drag the grade 7+ share down. Each figure in the table above comes from 19b; take the same rows from 19a and every one of them moves. A regional gap quoted with no source could have come from either, and it helps to know which.

Second, the unit being counted is the entry, not the pupil. Where students each take ten GCSEs, a region produces more entries than one where they take seven. Entry patterns vary sharply from one region to the next, so this carries more weight than it might seem. In 2025, the average state school pupil in London entered 7.79 GCSEs, and in the North East 6.6. Counting vocational and technical qualifications as well brings the two closer, to 8.1 and 7.5, without removing the difference.

Third, the choice of subjects moves the percentages by itself. For years, London schools have tended to put students in for traditional GCSEs over vocational equivalents. Picture two regions whose students are equally able: if one entered more of them for subjects in which top grades are harder to get, the two would still report different grade 7+ percentages. Part of the gap, then, comes from how results are measured rather than from any difference in learning.

The gap is still real. The underlying difference, though, is probably somewhat smaller than the headline implies.

What explains London’s lead?

Researchers have looked at this question for two decades, and what they found is more interesting than the explanations usually offered when results come out.

The schools are probably not the reason. In Simon Burgess’s analysis, most of London’s advantage in pupil progress goes away once the model takes ethnicity into account. The capital’s demographic profile differs markedly from the rest of England’s, and several ethnic groups well represented in London have higher average attainment across the whole country, not only there. Read that way, London’s schools are doing something nearer to an ordinary job, with an unusual intake.

Much of the gap exists before secondary school begins. Blanden and colleagues found that disadvantaged pupils in London started to pull ahead in the late 1990s, in primary schools as well as secondary ones, and that high attainment at Key Stage 2 contributes substantially to the GCSE results that follow. By the time a London student starts Year 7, a large part of the advantage is already there.

The usual explanation arrives too late. London’s improvement is often put down to the London Challenge and similar interventions from the mid-2000s. Blanden’s research found that the improvement started before those programmes did. Something lifted attainment in London, but the policies that tend to get the credit came too late to have caused it.

What sets London apart is at the bottom of the range, not the top. The most striking result is not how well London’s highest attainers do. It is how much better London’s poorest students do than poor students in other places. About half of London pupils eligible for free school meals reached the old benchmark of five good GCSEs; outside the capital, roughly a third did. No other region has a narrower attainment gap between rich and poor. That, more than the headline figure, is what other regions have spent twenty years trying to copy.

London is not the only case. Research on the same period found that Manchester and Birmingham also did better than the rest of England, and that on some measures of secondary progress, Birmingham students did better than London’s. A regional average conceals a great deal of variation from city to city.

Beyond England: the other three nations

Putting the four nations next to each other takes care, because their results are not on one shared scale.

The highest share of top grades in 2026 was in Northern Ireland, where 31.7% of results were at grade A/7 or above. England’s figure was 21.8% and Wales’s 19.6%. At grade C/4 and above, the figures were 83.6% for Northern Ireland, 67.0% for England and 62.3% for Wales.

These figures cannot be set side by side directly. GCSEs in England are graded 9 to 1. In Wales, WJEC keeps the A* to G scale. CCEA in Northern Ireland also grades A* to G but adds a C* between B and C, roughly the same as grade 5 in England. Structure, entry patterns and cohort all differ between the systems, and the regulators themselves warn against reading from one to another.

Scotland is left out of the comparison on purpose. It does not award GCSEs. Students there take National 5 qualifications, usually in S4 at ages 15 to 16, graded A to D, and their results come out in early August rather than late. National 5 is the nearest equivalent to a GCSE, and English schools and universities accept it as one, but it is a different qualification inside a different framework. A table that lines Scotland up beside the English regions is comparing two things that were never designed to be compared.

What the regional figures say about one student

Almost nothing. That is the most useful thing to take from them.

Each regional average sums up hundreds of thousands of separate results, from schools that vary enormously. The differences inside any one English region are far larger than the differences between regions. A student at a strong school in the North East will do better than one at a weak school in London, and no regional figure alters that.

The research also points to demographic make-up and prior attainment, not anything about the region itself, as what drives the gap. Living in one place rather than another does not make a child attain less. The regional figure describes who lives where, and what happened at primary school. It is not a prediction for any one student.

Three conclusions follow from that, and they are of more use than the headline:

It starts early. If London’s advantage is substantially there by the time primary school ends, the period that matters comes long before Year 11. Stepping in once results begin to slip is late.

Geography is not the gap that matters most. In every English region there is an attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students, and London’s is the narrowest. That gap is bigger and more consistent than the regional one, and it responds better to intervention.

Where a family lives matters less for finding help than it did. A decade ago, a family in a small town looking for a subject specialist was limited to whoever happened to be close by. That limit has largely gone. A student’s location now restricts which tutor they can work with far less than it once did.

Online tutoring with Sophwick Tuition

Sophwick Tuition gives one-to-one online lessons in GCSE Maths, Science and English to students in the UK and internationally. Since every lesson is online, a student’s location makes no difference to which tutor they can have. Prices start from £25 per hour (GBP). The first step is a free 15-minute assessment call, and we reply to enquiries within 24 hours.

Book a free assessment call

Sources

Linking to primary sources is part of why this article is worth linking to.