The increase in maths and fall in English is, perhaps, a little unexpected, given that primary school attainment measures show a fall in maths and similar levels in reading, compared to pre-pandemic.
On average, female students achieve higher grades at GCSE than male students. But there have been some changes to this gender gap in recent years.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, the austria rcs data gender gap in top grades decreased slightly: from 7.7 percentage points in 2016 to 6.5 in 2019. And this difference was mainly driven by male students achieving higher grades: the proportion of entries from male students receiving a 7 or above increased from 17.6% in 2016 to 18.6% in 2019, while for female students there was a small fall of 0.2 percentage points over the same period.
During the pandemic, the gap increased again to a peak of 9.0 percentage points in 2021. While the grades of both male and female students increased from 2020-22, the grades of female students increased more sharply.
We might have expected to gender gap to fall back to 2019 levels both last year and this year. But that hasn’t quite been the case. It is actually smaller than pre-pandemic: 5.6 percentage points this year compared to 6.5 in 2019. And it’s fallen very slightly – by 0.2 percentage points – since last year.