GCSE Biology Tutor Barnet 2026: Grades at 21 Schools

Leading Tuition's GCSE Biology tutors in Barnet are expert one-to-one online teachers who plan each pupil's course from their own school's figures: DfE's provisional summer 2026 data counts 1,294 separate GCSE (9-1) Biology entries from 3,864 pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 across the 21 Barnet schools with 30 or more entries.

Barnet here means the London borough. DfE's table lists 37 Barnet schools with Biology entries; this page reads the 21 with 30 or more, names the other 16 with their totals, and keeps Combined Science, a different qualification, out of every count.

Which Barnet schools enter pupils for separate GCSE Biology, and how many?

DfE's subject-level table counts entries, not pupils: one entry is one pupil's result in the qualification. Beside each school's Biology entries it publishes the number of pupils at the end of Key Stage 4, the school's cohort for the year. The table below sets the two side by side, in order of Biology entries, so that a family can see how large the Biology group is at their own school before reading a single grade.

Across the 21 schools, 1,294 entries sit beside 3,864 pupils, an entry for 33.5% of the cohort. The share is not the same at every school, and it is meant to be read one row at a time. At Ashmole Academy, 89 of 258 pupils (34.5%) have a separate Biology entry; at The Compton School, 55 of 206 (26.7%). Those two sentences describe how the entries sit beside the cohort and nothing more.

What this changes in our programme is the starting question. A pupil in the separate Biology group is preparing for two papers with their own timing and mark scheme, so we ask first which qualification the child is entered for, and only then which board and tier. A pupil who sits Combined Science is outside these rows, and the figures here cannot stand in for that pupil's own mock papers.

The counts are provisional. DfE's Key stage 4 performance release for 2025/26 was published on 15 October 2026 and last updated on 28 October 2026, and it says the data in the release is provisional. There is no Progress 8 for these cohorts: DfE states that it is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26. Everything below is a count of entries at each grade, read from DfE's Subject school level exam data, version 2.0, on 2 November 2026.

How the grades fall at each school: grade 4 and above, grade 7 and above, grade 9

DfE publishes a count of entries at each grade from 1 to 9. The columns in the table below add those counts: grade 4 and above adds grades 4 to 9, grade 7 and above adds grades 7 to 9, and every percentage divides by that school's own Biology entries. The last column names the grade that has the most entries at the school, with the number of entries in brackets. Nothing is estimated and no figure is carried from one school to another.

Across the 21 schools the grade totals are: 46 entries at grade 4, 92 at grade 5, 202 at grade 6, 232 at grade 7, 215 at grade 8 and 481 at grade 9, which sum to 1,268 at grade 4 and above. The other 26 entries are 2 at grade 2, 15 at grade 3, 6 ungraded (U) and 3 coded X. Taken school by school, the most common grade is 9 at nine schools, 8 at two, 7 at three, 6 at four, 5 at one and 4 at one, and one school has a tie between 6 and 9.

The three columns do different jobs in a tutoring plan. The grade 4 and above count tells us how many of a school's entries are already at the level where the work is securing marks, so the first sessions go on the topics a pupil drops marks on rather than on re-teaching the course. The grade 7 and above count shows where the school's results already reach the top bands, and the grade 9 count shows how many entries reach the top of the scale. The most common grade is the grade with the most entries at that school.

The DfE rows used here do not split Foundation and Higher Tier, so we draw no conclusion about tier from them. Tier comes from the school, and it matters for the plan: the first conversation with a family settles tier, board and the latest mock result before anything else is decided.

Selective and non-selective schools in the Barnet rows

Get Information about Schools (GIAS), the DfE register of schools, records an admissions policy for each establishment. In the GIAS file read on 2 November 2026, three of the 21 schools are labelled Selective: Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, The Henrietta Barnett School and St Michael's Catholic Grammar School. Fifteen are labelled Non-selective, one independent school is recorded as Not applicable and two have no value entered. The table groups the 21 by that label and shows the working in the counts.

The working is plain addition. The three Selective schools have 172 + 104 + 56 = 332 entries and 192 + 104 + 127 = 423 pupils. Their grade 7 and above counts are 172 + 102 + 44 = 318, which is 95.8% of 332. The other 18 schools hold 1294 - 332 = 962 entries, of which 928 - 318 = 610 are at grade 7 or above, which is 63.4%. The borough-wide 71.7% at grade 7 and above is the sum of both groups. It is an arithmetic result of those two rows and of every school inside them.

The grade 9 counts are concentrated in a similar way, and the counts say it directly: Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet and The Henrietta Barnett School together have 276 entries, 21.3% of the 1,294, and 238 of the 481 grade 9 entries, 49.5%. Those are counts of entries, and they carry no inference about teaching or about who is admitted.

For a family the practical point is that a Barnet figure is not a substitute for a school figure. When we plan a course we read the child's own school row, the child's mock papers and the child's target grade, and we do not quote a borough average to a pupil as though it described their school.

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Barnet schools below the 30-entry cut

The 30-entry cut is ours: it keeps the grade counts large enough to read school by school. It leaves out 16 Barnet schools, listed below with the entries and pupils DfE publishes for each. Together they hold 189 entries from 1,145 pupils, so with the 21 schools above the whole Barnet table is 1,483 entries from 5,009 pupils across 37 schools.

Five of the 16 have a total but no grade counts: Hasmonean High School for Girls, Beth Jacob Grammar School for Girls, Tiferes High School, Susi Earnshaw Theatre School and Orange Tree School. DfE withholds the grade breakdown for these five. A withheld breakdown is not a zero and does not mean that no pupil achieved a grade; it means the file does not show the grades.

A small total in this file counts only the separate GCSE (9-1) Biology full course. The file does not carry other qualifications, so a small total says nothing about a school, its pupils or its science teaching, and this page draws no conclusion about any of the 16. A parent at one of these schools gets the same programme as everyone else: it starts from the child's mock papers, the board and the target grade, because there is no useful school row to start from.

What the separate Biology papers ask: AQA 8461 as the worked example

The exam board is the school's to confirm, and the DfE rows do not record it. AQA's GCSE Biology 8461 is used here as the worked example because its published assessment page sets the structure out in full. It has two written papers, each 1 hour 45 minutes, 100 marks and 50% of the GCSE, available at Foundation and Higher Tier. Together that is 200 marks in 210 minutes, so a pupil has 1.05 minutes for each mark.

Paper 1 assesses topics 1 to 4: Cell biology; Organisation; Infection and response; and Bioenergetics. Paper 2 assesses topics 5 to 7: Homeostasis and response; Inheritance, variation and evolution; and Ecology. The question types AQA lists are multiple choice, structured, closed short answer and open response. A pupil who revises topics 1 to 4 thoroughly and leaves 5 to 7 for later has prepared for one paper only.

Practical work is examined in the written papers. AQA states that a minimum of eight experiments are required for single science qualifications and 16 for double science, and that questions drawing on the practical activities will count for at least 15% of the overall marks. In our sessions this means a pupil explains each required practical in words, as a method and as a result, because that is the form in which the marks are awarded.

How a one-to-one online Biology plan runs for a Barnet pupil

Every course follows the same order, and each step uses something from the sections above.

1. The call. We ask which school, which board, which tier and what the latest mock result was. The school row above is the first thing we look at, and the child's own mock paper outweighs it.
2. The topic check. The pupil sits a past paper under timed conditions and we mark it by topic across topics 1 to 7, so the first weeks go to the topics that cost marks.
3. The weekly session. One tutor, one pupil, online, on the topics from the check, with questions set between sessions and marked in the next one.
4. The practicals. Each required practical is rehearsed as a method, a result and a conclusion in the pupil's own words.
5. The full papers. Closer to the exams the pupil sits whole papers against the clock, because 1 hour 45 minutes is a different task from a topic quiz.

Leading Tuition reports that 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. A programme is built to that pupil's target, which is why the call comes first and the school figures second.

For a family comparing options, our GCSE Biology tuition overview sets out the subject across the country, and our Barnet tuition hub lists every level we teach in the borough. A pupil taking other GCSEs may also want GCSE maths tutors in Barnet and GCSE English tutors in Barnet, and a pupil who plans to take sciences into the sixth form can read about A-level Biology tutors in Barnet. DfE's own figures are in the Key stage 4 performance release, and the exam structure is on AQA's GCSE Biology 8461 assessment page.

Barnet GCSE Biology questions