Year-on-year comparisons are made more difficult during times of major impacts such as the Covid-19 pandemic, but this summer’s A Levels and GCSEs do point to some interesting trends in subject entries.

Trends from this year’s A Level entries include:

• Maths continued to be the most popular single A Level subject, rising by 2.6% and accounting for 12.1% of all A Levels with 94,264 entries.   
• Psychology moved up to being the second most popular subject (8.4% of all A Levels with 65,263 entries). 
• Computing saw the biggest year-on-year increase in entries, up 11.7% from 2019 rising to 12,428 entries. 
• Geography and History entries decreased by 13.6% (to 30,203) and 12.7% (to 44,898) respectively. 
• There was a slight (2.5%) decrease in the overall A Level entry for the summer 2020 series compared to last year, in line with a decrease in the size of the 18-year-old cohort (which fell by 3%).  The total number of A Level entries in the UK was 781,029.

And for GCSEs:

• Entries for the top 10 GCSEs remained in the same order as 2019. 
• Of the GCSEs with over 100,000 entries, Spanish saw the biggest year-on-year increase in entries, up 7.2% from 2019 to 109,594 entries. 
• History also had significantly increased entries up 4.8% from last year with 292,274 entries. 
• Of the GCSEs with less than 100,000 entries, PE dropped by 6.4% to 83,404.
• The number of GCSE entries overall increased this year, up 2.6% on 2019 with 5,692,464 entries.

Statistics covering the whole of the UK by subject, grade and gender for both 2020 and 2019 are available on the JCQ website. The figures in the article above represent UK-wide entries.