GCSE English re-sits rise after first year of reforms

The amount of pupils re-taking the English language GCSE has increased by nearly a third in the first year of the newly reformed exams.

This comes despite an overall drop in the number of pupils re-sitting exams.

There has been an overall drop of 19 per cent in GCSE entries for the November resits from 84,450 to 67,985, Department for Education statistics show.

There was still, however, an increase in the number of entries for the English language exam, with re-sits rising by nearly 20 per cent from 25,610 in 2016 to 32,970 this year.

Maths re-takes fell by over 40 per cent from 58,840 to 34,790.

Just 13 per cent of the entries were for the higher paper, with the remaining 87 per cent taking the foundation paper.

This was the first year of the reformed GCSEs in English language, English literature and maths, which are graded on a scale of 9 to 1.

GCSE results this summer showed 53 per cent of grades in English language, English literature and maths were a grade 5 or higher, with 71 per cent hitting a grade 4 or above.

Of the three reformed subjects, grades in English language were the lowest with 53.3 per cent achieving a grade 5 or above and 69.9 per cent getting a grade 4 or above.