Our 2026 GCSE and A-Level Results
What our students achieved in the summer 2026 exams, and exactly how we counted it
Book a Free ConsultationWhat our students achieved in the summer 2026 exams, and exactly how we counted it
Book a Free ConsultationThirty-four students sat GCSEs and A-Levels with Leading Tuition in the summer 2026 exam series: fifteen at GCSE and nineteen at A-Level. 91% got the grade they were aiming for, and across the cohort the average improvement from where they started with us was two grades. This page sets out what those two numbers count, before it sets out what they were.
If you are weighing up GCSE or A-Level tuition for next summer, book a free consultation and we will tell you which of our subject tutors we would put your child with, and what we honestly think is achievable from where they are now.
A-Level results came out on Thursday 13 August 2026 and GCSE results on Thursday 20 August 2026. These four messages arrived in the fortnight that followed, reproduced as they were written.
The first two are public. Leading Tuition is rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews, and not one of them is below four stars — the last review that was not five stars was written in August 2024. Check the profile yourself.
Brilliant tutors
The tutors Ramez, Rose and Yousif worked with my daughter for less than 2 months but taught her all exam techniques to get a 9.
Trustpilot, 22 August 2026. A GCSE parent.
Highly recommend
My daughter received excellent support from her tutors, who explained difficult topics clearly, helped build her confidence, and prepared her thoroughly for her exams. Thanks to their dedicated teaching and guidance, she achieved an A* in both Biology and Chemistry.
Trustpilot, posted 17 August 2026. Trustpilot records the experience date as 13 August 2026, A-Level results day.
I ended up getting an A* in maths. I got into my firm university (Oxford) so I'm really happy with how I did!! This is the best possible outcome.
Maths has been quite up and down for me over the past 2 years so it feels great to finish on the high of getting an A* when it counts. I felt really prepared thanks to our sessions.
A-Level student, August 2026. A* in Maths and a confirmed place at the University of Oxford, after Oxbridge admissions preparation alongside the subject teaching. Shared with permission.
She got 11 grade 9s. Happy with resultant
A parent, 12:25pm on GCSE results day, 20 August 2026. Shared with permission.
A grade improvement means very little on its own, because in some years everybody's grades go up. 2026 was not one of those years. Nationally, top grades moved by a tenth of a percentage point at both GCSE and A-Level.
| England, all entries | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| GCSE entries graded 7 or above | 23.0% | 23.1% | +0.1pp |
| A-Level entries graded A* or A | 28.2% | 28.3% | +0.1pp |
Source: FFT Education Datalab analysis of Joint Council for Qualifications and Ofqual data, published 13 August and 20 August 2026.
Nor is 2026 an outlier year that flatters everyone. At GCSE it was the third year running in which grades edged up, and they remain a little above where they sat before the pandemic: in 2019, 21.9% of GCSE entries were graded 7 or above and 69.9% were graded 4 or above. The movement is real, but it is measured in fractions of a percentage point across a national cohort, which is not the scale at which an individual child's grade changes.
So when a Leading Tuition student moved two grades between starting with us and their certificated result in August 2026, almost none of that came from the national picture shifting underneath them. That is why we publish the national figures next to our own rather than on a page of their own.
Aiming for a specific grade next summer?
Tell us the grade and the subject on a free consultation and we will name the GCSE or A-Level tutor we would put your child with, and say honestly what the gap looks like from where they are now.
Book a Free ConsultationPlenty of tutoring companies publish a percentage. Very few publish the number of students underneath it. Here is ours, before you decide what the 91% is worth.
34 students, and all 34 are in the figure. Fifteen sat GCSEs and nineteen sat A-Levels with us in summer 2026. Nobody has been left out, and there is no separate cohort we are not showing you.
These are certificated results, not survey responses. We did not send a feedback form and count the replies. Every grade here is the one printed on the student's certificate, confirmed with the family. A survey only ever tells you about the families who answered it.
The target was set before we taught anything. "The grade they were aiming for" is the grade the family named at the first consultation. Where a target was revised downwards during the year, we still measure against the original one.
The two grades are measured from the student's starting point with us — the grade they were working at when they joined — to the certificated result issued in August 2026, averaged across the whole cohort rather than taken from each student's best subject.
We do not publish a grade distribution. With 34 students, a subject-by-subject breakdown would identify individual children to anyone who knows them. The cohort is small and we would rather say so than dress it up.
A percentage is easy to flatter after the fact by adjusting what counts. So here is the 2027 rule, published in August 2026, before a single result exists: every student who sits a GCSE or A-Level with Leading Tuition in the summer 2027 series will be counted; the target will be the one recorded at their first consultation; the improvement will be measured from the grade they were working at when they joined.
If we ever change that rule, we will say on this page that we changed it and why. 2027 will be added alongside 2026 rather than replacing it, so the record builds up in public where it can be checked against what we said at the time.
Source: Leading Tuition's own record of the summer 2026 exam series, compiled from results confirmed directly by each family. Last updated 28 August 2026.
We would rather you interrogated this page than took it on trust, and the same four questions work on anyone else's. They are the questions we had to answer for ourselves before publishing.
1. What is the denominator? A percentage without a number of students underneath it is not a result, it is a shape. Ninety per cent of ten children and ninety per cent of a thousand are different claims, and a company that will not tell you which one it is has usually decided the number does not help.
2. Is this a headcount or a survey? This is the question that separates most published tutoring results from most parents' assumptions. If figures come from a feedback survey, they describe the families who chose to reply, and the ones who did not reply are invisible. Ask whether every student who sat the exam is in the figure, and ask who decided which families were asked.
3. When was the target set, and by whom? A target agreed in September is a promise. A target agreed in April, after a disappointing mock, is an adjustment. Both are honest ways to work, but only one of them can be used to claim a success rate, and the difference is invisible in the finished percentage.
4. What are you not being shown? Ask what happens to the students who miss. A results page on which nobody ever falls short is describing a filtering policy rather than a teaching one. It is worth knowing which children a company will take on before you ask how well its children do.
Ninety-one per cent is not a hundred, and the students it does not cover are inside that figure rather than quietly outside it. Any results page showing 100% has either taught very few children or moved the goalposts.
When a target stops being realistic we say so in the autumn term, not on results day. We would rather lose the work than let a family spend a year believing something we have stopped believing. And in the week itself the job changes completely: remarks, appeals, resits and sixth-form places all run to deadlines measured in days, so that is what those families get from us in August. If that is where you are now, start with what to do if you missed your grades, and if a resit or a retake year is on the table, book a free consultation and we will match your child to a GCSE or A-Level tutor in the subject that went wrong.
A student sitting at a grade 6 in February and a grade 9 in August has rarely learned three grades of new content. They have stopped losing marks they already knew how to earn. That gap is the one we go after first, because it is the one that moves fastest, and it is why the number of hours a grade actually takes varies so much between two students sitting at the same mark.
Every programme starts by marking the student's own work against the mark scheme their exam board actually uses — AQA, Edexcel or OCR, not a generic one — so we can see whether marks are going missing in the content, the exam technique or the timing. Those three problems have completely different fixes, and treating all of them as "needs more revision" is the commonest reason a whole year of tutoring produces half a grade. The parent above described three tutors and under two months to a grade 9. That is what a correctly diagnosed gap looks like once it is closed.
A worked example makes the distinction concrete. A student loses four marks on a six-mark extended-response question in Biology. If they did not know the content, the fix is teaching. If they knew it but wrote a list where the mark scheme wanted a linked explanation, the fix is twenty minutes on how that command word is marked, and it transfers to every similar question in the paper. If they knew it and could have written it but ran out of time three questions earlier, the fix is neither of those; it is the pacing decision they made on question two. Three students can lose the same four marks for three different reasons, and only one of them needs more revision.
It only works if the person doing the diagnosing can do it. We take about three in every hundred tutors who apply, and the ones who get through have taught the specification long enough to know where its marks hide. That process is set out on how we choose tutors.
If you want that diagnosis done for your own child rather than described in the abstract, book a free consultation. We will look at a recent paper, tell you where the marks are actually going, and name the GCSE or A-Level tutor we would put them with.
Thirty-four: 15 GCSE students and 19 A-Level students who sat exams in the summer 2026 series. Every one of them is inside the figures on this page. There is no second cohort held back because it read less well, and no student was dropped for joining late or for any other reason. It is a small number and we would rather publish it than imply a larger one, because a percentage without a denominator underneath it tells a parent nothing at all. Thirty-four is also small enough that we can talk you through any individual case on a call.
No. They are certificated results, confirmed with each family, covering every student who sat an exam with us. It is a headcount rather than a sample, which is why the number of students is published next to the percentage. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Survey-based figures describe only the families who chose to reply, and the families who did not reply are invisible in the result. Since we would have no way of knowing whether those families were the pleased ones or the disappointed ones, a survey response rate would tell you very little about how the cohort actually did.
Yes. 91% is the public-exam figure: the share of GCSE and A-Level students who achieved the grade they were aiming for in the summer 2026 series. The separate 95% figure that appears elsewhere on the site refers to selective school entrance offers at 11 plus and 13 plus in the 2025 cycle. That is a different group of children, sitting different examinations, measured by whether a school made an offer rather than by a grade. The two are never averaged together or presented as one number, and if you ever see them combined anywhere on this site, it is a mistake and we would like to know about it.
The grade the student was working at when they joined Leading Tuition, compared with the certificated result issued in August 2026. It is averaged across the whole cohort rather than taken from each student's best subject, which would produce a flattering number that described nobody. The comparison matters because in some years the national picture lifts everybody: 2026 was not one of those years, as top grades moved by a tenth of a percentage point at both GCSE and A-Level. So almost none of the movement in this cohort came from a generous marking year underneath it.
Not individually, because they belong to the families concerned and with 34 students a breakdown would identify children. What we can do is take any figure on this page and walk you through how it was arrived at, name the tutors involved, and put you in touch with a current family in your subject and year group. If a number here cannot survive that conversation, it should not be on the page.
No, and a page full of A*s and grade 9s can easily give that impression. The two-grade average is a cohort figure, and a move from a 4 to a 6 counts exactly the same in it as a move from a 7 to a 9. In practice the work is often more straightforward lower down, because the marks a student is losing tend to be ones they already know how to earn. What we ask is that the target is honest, not that it is high.
Within a fortnight of GCSE results day in August 2027, and counted by the rule set out on this page in August 2026, before any 2027 result existed. Publishing the method in advance is the point: it means the definition cannot be quietly adjusted afterwards to improve the number. Earlier years stay on the site rather than being replaced, so anyone can check what we said at the time against what we say later. If we ever change the counting rule, we will say on the page that we changed it, and why.
We start by marking your child's own work against the mark scheme their exam board actually uses, so we can see whether the marks are being lost in the content, the exam technique or the timing. Those three problems have different fixes and only one of them is solved by more revision. From there you get a named subject tutor, a target agreed in writing at the start, and an honest view of whether that target is reachable in the time left. Book a free consultation and we will tell you which tutor we would put your child with.
Book a free consultation and we’ll help you find the right support for your child.
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