Government lowers new GCSE pass mark

The government has scrapped plans to make grade 5 the benchmark pass mark for the new reformed GCSE.

Education secretary Justine Greening has announced that grade 4 will now be considered a “standard pass”, while grade 5 will be called a “strong pass”.

This is part of plans to phase in numerical GCSE grades of 9 to 1, opposed to A* to G, beginning with maths, English literature and English Language this summer.

The Department for Education (DfE) originally said that a grade 5, which is the equivalent of a high C or low B in current GCSEs, would be seen as a “good pass”, in a bid to make the new qualifications more challenging.

Greening said in a letter to the education committee chair, Neil Carmichael, that she was “determined to continue to raise standards” and would include the new “strong pass” as an accountability measure for schools.

Despite this, Greening also stated that she wanted to reassure schools that a grade 4 was a “credible achievement” that should be valued.

She also stated that the changes were to provide “certainty about how this new grading will work”.

Greening continued: “Rather than reporting on the good pass, we will instead distinguish between a grade 4 as a standard pass and a grade 5 as a strong pass and report on both.”

Grade 4 will also continue to be the level which pupils must achieve in order to avoid compulsory resits at sixth form.

Greening said she expected that where colleges and employers currently ask for a C grade or above, they will now ask for a grade 4 – that is, the “standard pass”.

Grade 5 will only be awarded to the top third of pupils achieving the current C grade. Pupils who achieve a middle or low C will receive a grade 4.