London students keep top spot for GCSEs with 28% getting best marks

LONDON students continued to score the best GCSE results in the country, it was revealed today, as a record number found out how they did in their exams.

- Rachael Burford

Hundreds of thousands of teenagers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland received their results in the first year where grade marking was restored to pre-pandemic 2019 levels in all three nations. The capital was the only region where more than a quarter of papers were graded at 7 (A) or above.

Some 28.5 per cent of entries in London were given the top classifications - a small rise of 0.1 points on last year.

The South-East was the second-best region where 24.7 per cent of entries scored a grade of 7 to 9-up 0.3 points on 2023.

North-East England saw the lowest number of top grades awarded at 17.8 per cent.

However, this was up from up from 17.6 per cent last year and the first time the region has narrowed the gap with London in nearly a decade.

Myles McGinley, the director of regulation at the exam board OCR, said there was still a lot to do to bring down regional education inequality.

He said: "At Grade 7...results are 10.72 percentage points lower in the North-East than in London, and the gap between them in 2024 decreased very slightly by 0.04 percentage points.

At grade 4 (C) London remains the top-performing region and the West Midlands the lowest-performing region.