Grammar School League Tables 2026: What They Actually Measure

The league tables published in 2026 report exams sat in summer 2025, and they carry no Progress 8 column, because the pupils who sat those GCSEs never sat key stage 2 tests. Across local authorities, the share reaching grade 5 in English and maths runs from 24.7% to 69.3%.

Which exam year do the 2026 league tables actually report?

Summer 2025. This is the single most common misreading, and it matters for a parent choosing a school for 2027 entry, because the cohort being ranked left school before their child will even sit an entrance test.

The Department for Education's key stage 4 performance release for academic year 2024/25 is based on the grades announced on 21 August 2025. It was published on 23 April 2026, last updated on 4 August 2026, and the next release in the series is due in October 2026. So a table you read today describes pupils who started Year 7 in September 2020 and left school in the summer of 2025. Their teachers, their head teacher and the school's admissions arrangements may all have changed since.

The figures are also revised rather than provisional. They are built from the results awarding organisations supply to the Department, including amendments schools requested during the autumn checking exercise, and those amendments feed the published secondary school performance tables too. That makes them the most accurate version of the 2025 picture available; it does not make them a current one.

Why is there no Progress 8 column for 2025 or 2026?

Because there is nothing to measure progress from. Progress 8 compares a pupil's GCSE results with the results of all pupils nationally who had the same key stage 2 starting point. Primary tests and assessments were cancelled in 2019/20 and 2020/21 because of COVID-19, and those two cohorts reached the end of key stage 4 in 2024/25 and 2025/26.

The Department is explicit: it is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for either year, and in April 2024 the previous government announced there would be no replacement. Progress measures will therefore not be published for 2024/25 or 2025/26 at all.

This is the most consequential gap in the current tables, and it lands hardest on exactly the comparison parents most want to make. Attainment measures reward a school for the pupils it admits. Progress measures reward it for what it does with them. A selective school with a high Attainment 8 has, by construction, admitted high-attaining children; without a progress measure there is no published number that separates the intake from the teaching. For two consecutive years, that number does not exist.

The practical consequence is that any 2026 ranking of grammar schools is a ranking of outcomes, not of value added, and should be read as one. Our selective school guidance covers what actually distinguishes selective schools from one another once the attainment measures have been set aside.

What do the four headline measures actually measure?

With Progress 8 gone, four measures remain, and they answer quite different questions.

Two design details are worth knowing. Attainment 8's maximum rose to 90 points in 2018, from 87 in 2017 and 80 in 2016, as reformed 9-1 GCSEs were phased in, which is why scores from the mid-2010s are not comparable with today's. And the EBacc average point score awards zero for any pillar a pupil did not enter, so it measures curriculum breadth as much as attainment. A school that does not enter pupils for a language is penalised on that measure regardless of how well its pupils do in everything else.

Nationally in 2024/25, 40.5% of pupils were entered for the full EBacc, the highest rate since the measure was introduced in 2010 and up from 40.4% in 2023/24 and 40.0% in 2018/19. 85.6% were entered for four or more components, down slightly from 86.0%. Of those entering exactly four, 88.4% were missing the languages component. The national EBacc average point score rose from 4.07 to 4.09.

Which local authorities top the tables, and why does that matter?

The Department publishes the range across local authorities, and the extremes are startling.

Look at the right-hand column. Kingston upon Thames tops England on two of the four measures and Sutton on a third. Both are fully selective boroughs. Kingston maintains Tiffin School and The Tiffin Girls' School; Sutton maintains a cluster of grammar schools that between them take a large share of the borough's highest-attaining pupils. Their local authority averages are high in significant part because selective schools sit inside them.

That is not a criticism of either borough, and it is not a claim that their schools are ordinary. It is a warning about what an average over a selective area is made of. If you are using authority-level figures to decide where to live, you are partly measuring how much academic selection an area does, not how well it teaches. The same caution applies in reverse at the bottom: Knowsley is last on three of the four measures and has no selective schools to raise its average.

How much does region explain, rather than the school?

Less than local authority does, because a region averages many authorities together, but still a great deal.

Outer London leads on three of the four regional measures and Inner London on the fourth. The Department notes that the authorities with the highest averages cluster in London and the South, and those with the lowest in the North and Midlands, a pattern that has held for several years. For a family comparing a grammar school in Kent with one in Lincolnshire, part of the difference in headline attainment is regional context that neither school controls.

Two gap figures put the school-level differences in perspective. The Attainment 8 gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers was 19 points in 2024/25, up slightly from 18.9 in both 2018/19 and 2023/24. The gap between girls and boys on grade 5 or above in English and maths narrowed sharply to 3.1 percentage points, from 4.7 the year before, driven mostly by girls' attainment falling rather than boys' rising.

Why can you not compare a school's 2025 score with its 2019 one?

Because the Department for Education says you cannot, and it is the body that produces the numbers.

Its release explains that the attainment measures were affected by the cancellation of GCSE exams in 2019/20 and 2020/21 and their replacement by centre-assessed and teacher-assessed grades, and again by the 2022 grading approach, which broadly reflected a midpoint between 2019 and 2021 before a return to pre-pandemic conditions from 2023. Its conclusion is unambiguous: changes seen in the headline attainment statistics for those years likely reflect changes in grading approach and methodology rather than changes in standards, and it is not possible to compare pupil attainment across years to detect changes in pupil performance.

What the data can legitimately show, the Department adds, is whether attainment gaps between groups of pupils have changed between years. So a claim that a grammar school has "improved since 2019" on Attainment 8 is not supportable from the published figures. A claim that the disadvantage gap has widened is.

This matters because a great many school rankings are presented as trends. A table showing a school rising or falling over six years is showing you the effect of three different grading regimes as much as anything the school did.

What should a parent look at instead?

Four things, in this order.

Whether your child can get in at all. A grammar school's attainment figures are irrelevant if its catchment excludes you or its test is one your child will not sit. Establish the admissions arrangements first and the rankings second. Several selective schools now publish their own applicant, qualifying-score and appeal data, which is far more decision-relevant than an Attainment 8 average.

The measures the school does not top. A school with a very high Attainment 8 and a middling EBacc average point score is probably not entering everyone for a language. That may suit your child or it may not, but it is a curriculum decision the headline number hides.

Sixth form and destinations. Key stage 4 measures stop at GCSE. For a selective school the more useful question is usually what happens in the sixth form, and that is a separate set of published data.

The intake. With no progress measure for two years, the only honest way to read a selective school's attainment is alongside how selective it is. A school admitting the top few per cent of a large applicant pool should post exceptional GCSE results; that it does so is confirmation, not evidence of teaching quality.

If you would like help turning a shortlist into a realistic plan, our borough-by-borough guidance sets out what each area's schools test and when, and you can book a free consultation to talk it through.

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