Year by year
Every bar below is Edexcel, the only board publishing this subject. 2022 grades were the assessed-grades peak, and the reset since is visible in the shape of each year.
Edexcel — the only board publishing this subject
Position among the 39 subjects Edexcel published in every year from 2022 to 2026. Subjects that appear in only some years are left out, so the field is the same size each time and a change of place is a change in the subject rather than a change in the table. A subject sits differently on each measure, so the ranking is only ever a ranking of that one thing. The block beside each measure is the whole grade scale, in the colours used at the top of this page, with the grades that measure counts filled in.
The 9 subjects shown span 31.6 percentage points in 2022.
931 entries in 2022, 840 in 2026 — a change of −9.8%, against +12% across all 39 subjects Edexcel published in every year from 2022 to 2026. This is what students chose, not how they were graded.
Every subject starts level at its 2022 size, so the bars show growth and decline rather than which subject is biggest. Boards that publish no entry counts are left out.
Ranked by growth since 2022, so #1 is the fastest-growing subject rather than the largest. In 2022 the 9 shown run from +0.0% to +0.0%.
Board by board · 2026
With a single board there is no cross-board comparison to draw; the figures below are the complete published picture.
Japanese is also offered at A-level: see the A-level distribution →
Grade distributions reflect who enters a subject as much as the exam itself, so nothing on this page is a difficulty ranking. Figures are published cumulative percentages from JCQ and the awarding bodies; per-grade shares are derived by subtracting adjacent bands. How the data is sourced and worked out.