Girls stay ahead in GCSEs

Celebrations at Colchester High School, Essex

Girls have achieved better grades than boys in almost every GCSE subject this year - and the gender gap is widening rather than closing.

Some 670,000 pupils in the UK are receiving the results of exams set by the English and Welsh examining boards - 5.5 million GCSEs in all.

The overall figures show a slight improvement in the numbers achieving grades A* to C - up by almost one percentage point to 56.6%.

And the number of pupils passing at all grades, A* to G, has increased by 0.2% to 97.9%.

Click below for complete subject-by-subject tables of all the results at:

GCSEs
GCSE short courses
GNVQ foundation level
GNVQ intermediate level

There has been an increase in the pass rate every year since GCSEs were launched over a decade ago - and the exam boards say they now expect the figure to have reached its peak.

There were 5.5 million GCSEs taken this summer by 670,000 pupils

But the gender gap, highlighted in last week's A-level results, continues to widen as girls continue to outperform boys in GCSEs.

In the top A* to C grades - the basis of league tables - girls outperformed boys by 61.1% to 51.9%, a gap of 9.2 percentage points. In Wales the gap was 11 points.

But in Northern Ireland, where most students got their results on Tuesday, 71.3% who took the local CCEA exam board's papers achieved grades A* to C.

In the English and Welsh boards there has been an increase in the proportion of boys gaining the top A* and A grades - up 0.4 to 13.1%. But girls have improved even more - up 0.8 to 18.4%.

Even in subjects in which boys have traditionally been more successful, girls have pulled ahead. This year's results for physics show that girls have overtaken boys in getting the largest share of the top A* grades.

And boys have shown little sign of catching up in the subjects in which girls have traditionally performed well, such as English in which 16.7% of girls achieved A* or A grades compared to 9.7% of boys.

More entries

Maths is one of the few areas in which boys have maintained a lead in the A* and A grades, if only by a margin of 0.4 percentage point.

But among maths candidates scoring A* to C grades, the girls are outperforming the boys.

There has been an overall increase in the number of GCSEs taken this summer, which the exam boards attribute in part to a demographic bulge in 16 year olds and also to students taking more exams - with the current average being eight or nine GCSEs per pupil.

Exam boards have also identified information technology as the subject growing fastest in popularity, with an increase of almost 10% in candidates.

But there have been falls in the numbers of pupils taking geography and home economics.

Latin lovers

Although relatively few pupils took Latin, over 60% of the 10,000 candidates achieved an A* or A grade.

This year also saw an increase in pupils taking "short course" GCSEs - by 21,000 to over 275,000. These qualifications are worth half a GCSE and involve half the size of the full syllabus.

In particular, there were increases in short course GCSEs in religious education, physical education and information technology.

Vocational exams, GNVQs, suffered an overall decline in registrations, offset in part by rises in specific subjects such as information technology.

Popularity stakes

The table below shows the various GCSE subjects in order of their popularity with candidates, as shown by the number of entries.

SUBJECT	ENTRIES	%
Mathematics	673056	12.28
English	647436	11.81
English Literature	512572	9.35
Science: double award	489913	8.94
Design & Technology	424468	7.74
French	341004	6.22
Geography	251605	4.59
History	213346	3.89
Art	201296	3.67
German	133659	2.44
Religious studies	116234	2.12
Physical Education	102511	1.87
Business studies	100926	1.84
Information Technology	97963	1.79
Drama	89107	1.63
Science: single award	66036	1.20
Spanish	49973	0.91
Biology	48715	0.89
Chemistry	46917	0.86
Physics	46627	0.85
Music	45797	0.84
Home Economics	45093	0.82
Other modern languages	29164	0.53
Other social sciences	27859	0.51
Humanities	19943	0.36
Other sciences	16022	0.29
Combined subjects	11351	0.21
Latin	10560	0.19
Welsh: second language	9166	0.17
Economics	6220	0.11
Welsh: first language	4157	0.08
Classical Civilisation	3868	0.07
Welsh Literature	3348	0.06
Social Science	2638	0.05
Other technology	1666	0.03
Greek	934	0.02
All other subjects	100857	1.84

Note: Maths and English are compulsory.

Pupils in Northern Ireland who sat some or all of their exams with the local CCEA board got their results on Tuesday.