About

About the data.

Last updated June 2026

Grade Britain publishes UK GCSE and A-level national grade distributions — one place to see how every subject performs, which boards differ, and how the picture has shifted since 2022. This page explains where the figures come from, how they are worked out, and what they can and cannot tell you.

What this is

Grade Britain is a free reference tool — a website and a free iOS app — that shows the full grade distribution for every UK GCSE and A-level subject, broken down by exam board and year. You can compare how a subject sits nationally, see how individual boards diverge from that national picture, and watch how distributions have shifted from 2022 to 2025. There are no accounts and nothing to sign up for.

Who makes it

Grade Britain is built and maintained by Mike Lehnert, a Music Technology teacher operating as Music Tech Studio. It started as a tool for understanding how Music Technology sits relative to other A-level subjects — and grew from there into a resource for teachers, students, and anyone curious about how UK qualifications play out nationally.

Grade Britain is independent. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any awarding body, school, or government body. The grade data it uses is public — published each August by JCQ and the boards themselves. For questions or corrections: support@musictechstudio.co.uk.

Where the data comes from

Every figure in Grade Britain originates from one of two public sources:

The data covers the four most recent full examination series: 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. August figures are provisional; some boards later issue post-appeal revisions on a "final" basis. Where a row uses final rather than provisional figures, the explorer surface notes it.

Source integrity

No figures are invented, interpolated, or estimated. If a board did not publish results for a subject in a given year, that cell is left blank rather than filled in. An honest gap is always preferable to a plausible-looking number.

Independently audited

In June 2026 the full dataset — all 1,550 subject-board-year rows across GCSE and A-level — was independently re-checked against the official JCQ and awarding-body publications. 1,539 rows were confirmed directly against a published source; the remainder were traced back to source and the one real discrepancy found (a national GCSE Statistics parsing error) was corrected in the data pipeline itself, on the website and in the iOS app. Every row also passes automated internal-consistency checks (cumulative percentages must be monotonic and end at 100).

How the figures are worked out

Awarding bodies typically publish grade statistics as cumulative percentages — for example: "86.4% of candidates achieved grade A or above." Grade Britain derives the per-grade slice (the share who achieved exactly grade A) by subtracting adjacent cumulative bands:

share at grade A = (cumulative % at A or above) − (cumulative % at A* or above)

This is standard practice and matches what the boards themselves show in their tabular breakdowns. The derivation is done once, in a Python build script, and the results are stored in the data files the site reads — so the numbers you see are stable and auditable.

For some subjects, a JCQ national figure does not exist because only one board offers the qualification. Music Technology is the clearest example — it is Edexcel-only at A-level, so there is no multi-board national aggregate to show. In those cases Grade Britain displays the single board's figure under that board's name rather than labelling it as a national figure it is not.

What it covers

A-levels: 71 subjects across AQA, Pearson/Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, Eduqas, and Cambridge International, with JCQ national rows where they exist — 2022 to 2025. Grades run A* to U on the standard seven-point scale.

GCSEs: 62 subjects across AQA, Pearson/Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas, WJEC, CCEA, and Cambridge IGCSE, with JCQ national rows for England — 2022 to 2025. Most subjects use England's 9–1 scale; a small number of legacy and international qualifications use a 9–9 (A*–G) equivalent. WJEC covers the Wales specification, and CCEA covers Northern Ireland.

Some GCSE subjects — Maths, the sciences, and the main modern foreign languages — are tiered: candidates sit either Foundation (capped at grade 5) or Higher (able to achieve 9–4). The boards publish a single whole-subject aggregate that blends both tiers. Grade Britain shows that blended figure and notes that no per-tier breakdown is available.

What a grade distribution is not

A grade distribution is not a difficulty ranking. The share of students achieving A* in a subject is shaped by who chooses to sit it, not purely by how hard the specification is. A highly selected cohort — say, a sixth-form subject taken almost exclusively by students who are very strong in it — will tend to produce a higher-grade distribution than a subject with much broader uptake. That is a characteristic of the cohort, not evidence that the specification is easier.

Grade Britain shows the distributions honestly and leaves interpretation to you. The explorer deliberately avoids ranking subjects by "difficulty." If that framing is useful to you, it is yours to apply — but it is not the claim being made here.

Similarly, differences between boards on the same subject can reflect cohort differences (which schools enter which board, regional patterns, independent-vs-state split) as much as any difference in standard. The data shows the divergence; it does not explain it.

Corrections and feedback

If something looks wrong — a figure that doesn't match what you found in a board's own publication, a subject missing, or a year that appears inconsistent — please get in touch. Include the subject, level, board, and year, and I will check it against the source. Email: support@musictechstudio.co.uk.