Entries for A-level English have fallen by more than one-third in the past decade in England, latest statistics show, prompting calls for the government to roll back on key reforms in order to tackle this “crisis”.
Ofqual provisional data for summer 2022 showed there were 53,965 entries this year across all English A-levels – a 20 per cent drop on 67,865 in 2018, and a 35 per cent fall from 2013, when 84,250 entries were recorded.
Education chiefs agree that changes to the GCSE English course in 2017 have contributed to the drop. These included removing the spoken assessment in the language portion and placing greater emphasis on 19th-century texts at the expense of modern fiction.
