From time to time we lament the grading of GCSEs in modern foreign languages. The last time we did so was here when they, along with computer science, topped our chart of grading severity.
In this blogpost, we take a look at the 2023 data to see if anything has changed.
Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t.
We use 2023 Key Stage 4 data from the National Pupil Database related to pupils in state-funded mainstream schools.
We are mainly concerned with pupils’ results in GCSE French, German and Spanish. There were 117,000 entries in French, 31,000 in German and 111,000 in Spanish.
We compare pupils’ results in languages to their results in English language and mathematics. Almost all pupils who entered languages also entered English language and maths
