{"id":636226,"date":"2026-08-14T04:55:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T04:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/636226\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T04:55:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T04:55:21","slug":"fall-in-girls-top-a-level-grades-linked-to-mental-health-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/636226\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall in girls\u2019 top A-level grades linked to mental health crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sam Tuckett, an associate director for post-16 and skills at the institute, said girls were more susceptible to problematic social media use, issues with sleep and not feeling safe at school.<\/p>\n<p>He told The Telegraph: \u201cThese things are undoubtedly going to have an effect on the ability to do well in assessments, and particularly high stakes assessments.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt stands to reason that if you are struggling with mental health issues, that is only going to harm your ability to work and prepare for exams.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After the introduction of modular A-levels in 2000, girls led boys in achieving A* or A grades for the first 16 years, opening up a gap of nearly 3 percentage points at their peak in 2003.<\/p>\n<p>Boys briefly took the lead in 2017 and 2018 before girls surged ahead during the pandemic, leading by nearly 5 percentage points in 2021. However, boys have closed the gap since the pandemic and have stretched ahead.<\/p>\n<p>Official data show that teenage girls are now more likely to have mental health disorders than boys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Tuckett, an associate director for post-16 and skills at the institute, said girls were more susceptible to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[276],"tags":[268882,36636,268883,18,94618,135,19,17,167,502,5,1702,29172,14177],"class_list":["post-636226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-a-level-results-day","tag-a-levels","tag-department-for-education","tag-eire","tag-exams","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-news","tag-standard","tag-stem","tag-uk-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117092085211731216","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}