Result! Students see stars

THE most ever A* grades were awarded yesterday in a bumper results day for A-level pupils.

- Mark Reynolds

The top mark, introduced in 2010, was achieved by 9.3% of students compared with 8.9% in 2023 and 7.7% in 2019 - the last comparable year before Covid hit.

Barring the pandemic years, when exams were disrupted and grades based on teacher assessments instead of exams, no other cohort has achieved such success.

It was even better news for boys, who pulled further ahead with 9.5% of their entries scoring an A*, compared with 9.1% for girls.

The 0.4 percentage point gap was slightly larger than last year's 0.3. And it means boys have scored more A*s than female classmates every year since 2012, except for the Covid years of 2020 to 2022.

However, girls slightly edged boys to lead the overall share of A*/As this year, with 28% of female entries achieving the top two grades, compared with 27.6% for boys.

Congratulating all those getting their A-level, T-level and BTec results in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: "You've worked hard to get here, now nothing should hold you back from achieving your ambition."

Just over 300,000 students received exam results yesterday.

More than a quarter (27.8%) of all A-level entries resulted in an A or A*, up by 0.6 percentage points on last year when it was 27.2%. In 2019, the last comparable year, it was 25.4%.

In England, 4,135 students scored three A*s up from 3,820 last year and 2,785 in 2019.

Across all grades more than 80% of students achieved enough to get into their first-choice university.