Results: subject by subject

Amid the celebrations and recriminations about this year's record crop of A-level results, a worrying trend has become apparent: teenagers in the North of England are far less likely than those in the South to attain an A grade in their A levels and are making much slower progress than their southern counterparts.

In the past six years the A-grade pass rate has risen by 6.1 per cent in the South East, but by only 2.1 per cent in the North East, an analysis of A-level results by the Joint Council for Qualifications shows.

This pattern mirrors to some extent the North-South divide that is seen in so many other areas of life, most notably in health. But it is not simply to do with class or wealth, since the same gulf in achievement between the North and South persists even in independent schools, though to a lesser degree.

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So what is going on? To John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, who taught in the North East of England throughout his teaching career, this answer is simple.

“I will probably get shot for saying this, but parental aspirations are much lower in the North East than in the South and this affects exam performance. It shows just how much harder schools in the North East have to work to get their results,” he says.

Whatever the factors at work, it would be wrong to assume that schools in the North East will never be able to catch up with the rest.

Given the pockets of extreme deprivation and the high proportion of pupils fleeing the state system in the capital, you might expect London to be far behind the South East in A-level progress. In reality, it is almost on a par with the South East of England.

Much of the credit for this lies with the London Challenge, a school improvement programme, part of which is aimed at boosting parental involvement, particularly among those who are deemed “hard to reach”.

Since the programme's launch in 2003, London schools have improved slowly (these things take time), but significantly. For three consecutive years the capital's schools have outperformed the national average at GCSE and this is now feeding into A-level results.

The programme has been extended to the Black Country and Manchester and there is a £400 million National Challenge programme.

On the more vexed question of whether A levels are getting easier or becoming dumbed down, there is plenty of research to suggest that this is true. According to Robert Coe, at Durham University, the A-level results for pupils of the same ability have improved by two grades since 1988.

But it is also worth remembering that the AS level has made life much easier for pupils to get an A grade and to avoid failure. Students who gain a grade B at AS now routinely retake their exams to try for an A so that they can boost their final grades.

The AS also serves as a useful sifting mechanism. Because a quarter of students fail their AS levels and decide not to continue those subjects to

A level, there are increasingly fewer opportunities for them to fail anything.

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