Terrific at the top! Surge in highest grades builds on pre-pandemic GCSE record

With 85.6 per cent of GCSEs (General Certificates of Secondary Education) at QE awarded level 8 or 9 grades – equivalent to the old A* – the first pupils to sit public examinations at Queen Elizabeth’s School, Barnet, since 2019 have put in a “terrific” record-breaking performance.

In fact, results at the highest grades at the boys’ grammar school are not only stronger than for the last pre-pandemic GCSEs in 2019, but also surpass last year, when the government brought in a system of Teacher Assessed Grades.

Behind the statistics lie many individual successes, such as the 28 pupils recording straight 9s across all their full GCSEs, and Vigaashan Asokan, whose performance in Economics was the best in the country, according to examination board OCR.

A student at Queen Elizabeth’s School, Barnet, displays his GCSE result. (Picture: Eleanor Bentall)

Headmaster Neil Enright said, “This is a super performance from our Year 11 boys, who faced significant disruption because of the pandemic in the first year of their GCSE courses. The results for the top grades are simply terrific!

“These pupils had to cope with home-learning, close-contact isolation, stringent health & safety measures and frequently changing routines. Yet their results indicate that, while the methods used by them and their teachers were somewhat different from normal years, they have delivered on their potential. They worked diligently and with dedication, were always mature about the challenges, and were enthusiastic about embracing all the opportunities available to them, both within and beyond the classroom.

The family of a student who came out with flying colours in the examination. (Picture: Eleanor Bentall)

“Congratulations must also go to our staff, especially in view of the great flexibility they showed during those difficult months. Using our eQE platform and other technologies, they maintained the breadth and rigour of the normal QE experience as much as possible, ensuring that no one fell behind, that we maintained pace with course content, and even that we delivered opportunities outside of lessons for enrichment and collaboration.”

Among the key highlights of today’s GCSE results at QE are:

• Almost two-thirds of examinations taken (64.1 per cent) are awarded the highest possible grade, level 9

• 85.6 per cent of GCSEs are awarded grades 9 and 8

• More than 19 out of every 20 GCSEs are given grades 9–7, representing a 0.4 per cent drop on 2021’s Teacher Assessed Grades, but a sharp increase of 4.6 per cent on figures for 2019, when public examinations were last sat

• A near-perfect performance in Latin, with the 18 candidates achieving an average grade of 8.90

• Similarly strong performances for the individual science GCSEs – Chemistry (8.88), Biology (8.82) and Physics (8.82), with no pupil awarded a grade below 7

• In Mathematics, taken by all 191 boys in the year group, the average grade is 8.80: again, no pupil was awarded a grade below 7.

Enright added, “Looking back, necessary though the lockdowns and pandemic restrictions were, we can now see that they gave staff, pupils and parents alike a fresh appreciation of the benefits of on-site learning. Happily, things here have since rebounded as strongly as ever, with these pupils, and the School as a whole, able to look forward with optimism to what comes next.”