Some 73,000 fewer top A-level grades were awarded in England, Wales and Northern Ireland than last year, exams boards said.
Tens of thousands fewer top A-level grades were handed out to students this year following efforts to bring results back down to pre-pandemic levels.
Ucas said 79% of 18-year-old applicants from the UK have secured their first choice, which is down from 81% last year but up from 74% in 2019. The overall pass rate – the proportion of entries graded A* to E – dropped to 97.3% this year, which is lower than 2022 and the pre-pandemic year of 2019 . She said: “It really does add insult to injury coming a Government that completely failed to put in place the kind of support that our young people needed coming out of the pandemic, after all of the disruption they’d experienced.”
In Wales, 34.0% of entries were awarded an A or A* grade, compared to 26.5% in 2019, and in Northern Ireland 37.5% of entries were awarded the top grades, compared to 29.4% in 2019.A total of 3,820 students in England scored three A* grades, figures from Ofqual show. This is down from 8,570 last year, but up from 2,785 in 2019.
She told the PA news agency: “Whilst there are higher top grades than there were in 2019, it’s a narrow margin. Dr Saxton added that it was important to recognise there were “long-standing differences” in outcomes between regions in England which “predate the pandemic by a country mile”.Overall, 9.1% of boys’ entries scored an A* grade, compared with 8.8% of girls’ entries – a 0.3 percentage point gap.But despite boys taking over at A* grades, girls continue to outperform their male counterparts in terms of A*-A.
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