Maths GCSE outcomes – simply a measure of how wealthy you are?

The latest GCSE outcomes have landed and, as always, the dissection by groups like Ofqual, and FFT has already begun. The headlines in maths are the slight drops in in the proportion of students achieving at or above the major headline grades (1, 4, 7) and above – a continuation of the downward trend that was started to address the grade inflation caused as a result of Centre/Teacher assessed grades awarded during the height of the COVID pandemic. This is lessened when we consider only those students aged 16, with 0.1 percentage points drop in the 1+ and 4+ figures, and a 0.3 percentage points rise at 7+; with the small overall drops attributed to the number of resit students rising, with the usual low proportion of these students achieving these thresholds.

In previous years, I would normally have either been buried in maths data, looking for the lessons we could learn for the following year and which of our students were close enough to a grade boundary to be worth entering for a review of marking or, more recently, analysing whole school data to look for successes or issues in subjects that we need to get ahead of and discuss with the head of department. Without these burdens this year, I enjoyed diving into the detail around the local and national pictures for GCSE Maths in particular, using the excellent Ofqual analytics visualisations, particularly the map of how GCSE results vary by county for each of the grade boundaries.

(Image taken from Ofqual Analytics site and shows the proportion of 16-year-old students achieving grade 7 or above in the different counties in England).

The visualisation is fairly similar for grades 4 and up, showing the much larger proportions of 16-year-olds achieving the top grades across the southern band of counties stretching from Gloucestershire in the West through to Kent in the East, passing through Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Greater London and Surrey (the other counties that are at 22% or better are Warwickshire, Cambridgeshire, Rutland and Dorset).

I have used this map before, but typically just to get the regional averages for different grades and different subjects in my school, so that our outcomes can be compared to our region as well as the national picture. However, taking a broader view this year, I decided to look at how this maps to the differences in deprivation across the country.

(Image taken from the Office for National Statistics household deprivation maps based on the 2021 National census data)

This map shows local authority district rather than county, and there are typically two or more local authorities within each county, but the overall picture is remarkably similar to the outcomes map, with the lower deprivation areas spanning that line from Gloucestershire through to Kent. The outliers in this are actually around London (where per-pupil funding can be nearly double other areas in the country) and parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria – North Yorkshire’s outcomes for 7+ are in the 20-22% range (which is around the average for the country as a whole) and all three counties have areas (arguably the more populous areas) with the highest levels of deprivation (15% or higher).

Now, this is not a new phenomenon. In fact, if you roll the Ofqual map back through each year back to 2019 (as far as the map goes) the picture remains very similar – even through the inflated COVID years. But I had never had the regional divide in both top outcomes and household wealth driven home to me in the way that comparing these two maps brings. It serves as a glaring reminder that a school can be doing truly great things and still be limited in the impact they can have due to the wealth in the area that they serve. Of course, there will be anomalies in all of these areas, schools that buck the trend for their region, individuals that achieve top grades despite coming from a significantly deprived background. Like most statistically significant patterns, there are always anecdotes that can be found that do not conform to the narrative. However, data on this scale simply doesn’t lie – your chances of achieving top outcomes in maths are considerably higher if you live in a less deprived area, than if you live in one of the most deprived areas.

The government is, of course, aware of this connection and are taking steps to try and address it, reportedly planning to reallocate “around £2bn of funding to the places and communities that need it most”. How much impact this will have on education remains to be seen – more and more schools are no longer directly under local authority control; however, many still purchase support from local authorities for things like behaviour and SEND. Still, the fact seems to remain that, until the disparity in deprivation between the home counties and the rest of the country is addressed, top outcomes for pupils in these areas are likely to remain starkly divided.