Nearly a quarter of boys in England received top grades in GCSE math
Nearly a quarter of boys in England earned high grades in math on their GCSE exams: 24% of students received a grade of 7 or higher. Overall, the proportion of 16-year-old students in England who earned grades 7–9 rose by 0.1 percentage points to 23.1%, according to The Guardian.
Students take the GCSE exams in their 11th year of schooling. The proportion of nearly 700,000 16-year-old students in England who earned a grade of 4 or higher rose from 70.5% in 2025 to 70.7%. The rate of high grades set a record for England, excluding the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when exams were replaced by teacher assessments.
In mathematics, 22.3% of students received a grade of 7 or higher: 24% of boys and 20.5% of girls. At the same time, the proportion of girls who achieved a grade of 4 or higher in this subject fell from 71% to 70.7%, while among boys it rose to 72.8%.
Richard Harry, Executive Director of Qualifications and Assessment at the Welsh Joint Examinations Committee (WJEC), stated that the math scores of 16-year-old boys in England may be the highest in recent years. He noted that it is difficult to pinpoint the reasons for the improvement, but that assessment standards for GCSE and A-level mathematics have been maintained following the pandemic.
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Girls continue to outperform boys overall in GCSE results, though the gap has narrowed: it is 2.9 percentage points smaller than in 2019. In English, results rebounded after last year’s decline: 66.1% of boys and 76.8% of girls achieved a grade of 4 or higher.
More than one million students in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland received their GCSE results on Thursday. In the United Kingdom, 22% of all exam papers received a grade of 7 or an A and above—0.1 percentage points higher than last year. In 2019, this figure stood at 20.8%.
At the same time, regional disparities persist. In London, 28.6% of grades were 7 or higher, while in the northeast of England, the figure was 17.7%. Results for retakes among students aged 17 and older also remained low: 18.8% earned a grade of 4 in English, and 13.6% in math.
