Across England, this year’s GCSE, A-Level, T-Level and Vocational & Technical qualifications results have contained no surprises. Given that many entrants had their school and college studies badly disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the fact that results have broadly returned to pre-pandemic levels is undoubtedly good news.
Looking at the East of England, there are no dramatic changes. The persistent pattern across the Eastern Powerhouse Region remains stubbornly in place, with wide disparities between high-performing counties – Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, both well above the England average for both GCSEs and A-Levels – and counties like Bedfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, which perform below. There is a 14% gap between Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire in terms of A-Level high grades, and a 12% gap in good GCSE grades.
County | A-Level Grade A/A* % | GCSE Grade 4+ %
|
Bedfordshire | 19.1 | 64.4 |
Cambridgeshire | 32 | 70.5 |
Essex | 24.5 | 67.2 |
Hertfordshire | 33 | 75.8 |
Lincolnshire | 21.5 | 63.9 |
Norfolk | 23.6 | 65.4 |
Suffolk | 20.7 | 66.6 |
England | 27.6 | 67.4 |
The EPH has consistently argued that it would be too simplistic to explain this by looking at the quality of schools and colleges in different counties, since the proportion of institutions rated Good or above by Ofsted is broadly the same across different parts of the region. Our assessment is that the the level of deprivation in some parts of the region, the travel-to-learn challenge in rural areas and sharp variations in the availability of work experience placements are all contributory factors.
Work experience is certainly a big challenge with the new T-Level qualification, currently being rolled out in phases across England as the flagship vocational alternative to A-Levels. The course has 45 days of industry placement as a core element, but outside large urban areas there simply aren’t enough local employers in the range of industry sectors required and finding enough placements is proving difficult. We don’t yet have any information on T-Level results at county level, but across the Eastern Region there were 588 results, which is 160% more than last year, but still a small proportion of the 7,380 results across England, which is itself less than 3% of total results at advanced level.
We also don’t yet have a geographical breakdown of the results of the nearly 250,000 Vocational & Technical Qualifications (VTQs) – BTECs, City & Guilds, Cambridge Technical and other courses – taken across England. Nationally pass rates have remained strong and we very much welcome the new government’s decision to pause and review the reckless policy of de-funding many of these courses to encourage higher take-up of T-Levels. Given the below-average results in GCSEs and A-Levels in many parts of the region, we suspect that VTQs are a vital pathway for many students in the East, and need to be retained, at least until T-Levels have proved their worth.
So the best summary of results across the Eastern Powerhouse region is “could do better”. The EPH Manifesto makes a series of recommendations for action to tackle the underlying issues, which we will press the new government to take on board. In an era of widening devolution, the East needs its own specific strategies to spread educational opportunity and achievement across the whole region.
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