New GCSEs - A simple guide to 1-9 grades

Every GCSE results day, commentators say that the rise in attainment is a sign that GCSE examinations are getting easier (rarely crediting the students’ hard work and improvements in teaching – but that’s not an argument for today!). A few years ago, the government decided that enough is enough, and GCSEs need a major overhaul. I, for one, welcome the idea that our iconic qualification (yes, the GCSE is an iconic qualification) should be more challenging. There is plenty of evidence that the standard of work and depth and breadth of learning at GCSE does not compare favourably with the work produced in other countries by students of the same age. Accepting (I hope) that our students deserve access to the best of humanity’s culture and learning, it would be unfair to let them drop behind international peers. So, new GCSEs with notably increased demand were developed.

As a very strong indication that these were to be a huge break with what had gone before, the government did away with alphabetical grades from A* to G (and the U for ungraded) and replaced them with numerical grades from 9 to 1 (U remains for ungraded). Frankly, the meaning of these new grades has not always been easy for even teachers to understand. There’s been a lot of chopping and changing, but here are the basics.

• GCSE Results in 2017 had a mixture of each type of grades. English language, English literature and mathematics were graded with numbers. Everything else was still graded with letters. In 2018, almost all subjects will be graded with numbers.
• Grade 9 is the best. This grade is intended to be very hard to achieve. Far fewer students will get grade 9s than currently get A*s. In August 2017, we did have a few grade 9s in English and mathematics – a remarkable achievement for those students and a great reflection on the quality of education in this school.
• Grade 1 is the worst grade you can get without failing. So it is like a grade G in that way. Bear in mind that this grade is supposed to show some capability in the subject, but really not very much. Over 98% of all GCSE exams taken result in a grade, rather than a U.
• In old GCSEs, any grade that wasn’t a U meant you’d passed. (Yes, a grade D was a pass, it just wasn’t considered a ‘good pass’.) This is the same under new GCSEs – a grade 1 is still a pass. However, not all passes are created equal…
• In old GCSEs, passing with grade C or above was considered a good pass. This made the grade C very important to schools and students, particularly for access to college places and jobs in the future.
• This is where it gets mucky. The government wants standards to rise, but doesn’t want to disadvantage students who are going through the new GCSEs right now. So, they said grade 5 was a good pass. A grade 5 is not directly equivalent to grade C, though, because new GCSEs are supposed to be more demanding. A grade 5 is more like a low B in the old exams.
• The only direct comparisons that can be made between old and new GCSEs are: comparing A/A* grades achieved with 7, 8 or 9 grades achieved; comparing C and better with grade 4 and better; comparing grade G and better with grade 1 and better. Nationally this year, A/A* grades were down very slightly, as were C+ grades.
• What this means in practice for students (and their teachers) is that, for now, colleges were requesting grade 4s in English and maths. The demand is likely to rise to grade 5 to get into college in the future. At present, students who didn’t get grade 4 or better in either English or maths have to retake the GCSE at college.

So there we go. Simple really: it is not like golf, it’s like cricket – a bigger number is better.