Girls’ grades fall in growing A-level subjectspublished at 16:20 British Summer Time
16:20 BST
Libby Rogers and Rob England
BBC Verify
Boys have outperformed girls in top grades at A-level for the first time since 2018 across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
It’s a close race though, with boys getting only 0.2 percentage points more A or A*’s.
We’ve been digging further into the data and found there’s been an increase in the number of students taking some science, maths and economics subjects. In these areas, girls have done worse than last year, while boys have held steady or improved.
In the five subjects which saw the biggest percentage increase in students (excluding smaller subjects) girls’ performance dipped by 1.1 percentage points overall, while boys’ performance increased by 0.4.
If girls had maintained their grades from last year in these subjects, they would have drawn level with boys overall.
Chemistry saw the biggest gap between girls’ and boys’ top grades in the five subjects seen in the chart above, at 5.2 percentage points in favour of boys.
Economics, where girls outperform boys, saw a fall in grades for both genders. But for girls it was a sharper drop of 1.5 percentage points, compared with 0.1 for boys.
You can see more analysis of A-level results day here.