GCSE Tuition in Barnet 2026

Leading Tuition provides GCSE tuition in Barnet, a London borough where state-funded schools achieved an average Attainment 8 score of 56.7 in the 2025 GCSE results, more than ten points above the England state-funded average of 46.1. Barnet's rate of pupils reaching grade 5 or above in English and maths GCSEs was 63.1% that year, against 45.4% nationally. This page sets out what those figures mean school by school, and how our tutors work with Barnet GCSE students.

How Do Barnet's GCSE Results Compare With England and London?

Barnet's 2025 results, covering the 2024/25 academic year and based on grades announced on 21 August 2025, place the borough among the stronger-performing local authorities in England on every headline measure the Department for Education publishes. The table below sets Barnet's figures against England's state-funded schools, England's schools overall, and the highest-scoring English regions on each measure in 2025.

Outer London led every measure except EBacc entry, where Inner London's 57.1% was the highest of any English region; DfE's regional summary reports only the minimum and maximum local authority or region for each measure, not a full profile for every region, so the cells marked above are not published in that source table rather than genuinely zero. National context: 2025's EBacc entry rate of 40.5% was itself the highest recorded since the measure was introduced in 2010.

One measure is missing from that table by design. Progress 8 — which measures how much progress pupils make between key stage 2 and their GCSEs — cannot be published for 2025. The Department for Education states this directly: “It is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26. This is because there is no KS2 prior attainment data available to use to calculate Progress 8 when the relevant cohorts reach the end of KS4 as primary tests and assessments were cancelled in academic years 2019/20 and 2020/21 due to COVID-19 disruption.” The last year a Progress 8 score could be calculated was 2024, a full year behind the Attainment 8 and grade 5+ figures above. Barnet's 2024 Progress 8 score was 0.61 — described by DfE as well above average — against an England state-funded average of -0.03 the same year. Any local page still quoting a 2025 Progress 8 figure for a Barnet school is quoting a number DfE has said it cannot produce; the school-by-school table below marks every Progress 8 figure 2024, one year behind its Attainment 8 neighbour, for exactly this reason.

GCSE Performance Across Barnet’s Secondary Schools

Barnet's borough-wide figures are an average across 54 secondary schools and colleges of every type, maintained, academy and independent. The decision a family is usually weighing is about one specific school, so the table below sets out named, DfE-published figures for the thirteen Barnet secondaries with results substantial enough to publish across Attainment 8 and grade 5+ English & maths from the 2025 results, alongside Progress 8 from 2024, the last year DfE could calculate it. Schools are ordered by their 2025 Attainment 8 score.

For comparison, Barnet's own borough-wide average was 56.7 for Attainment 8 (2025), 63.1% for grade 5+ English & maths (2025) and 0.61 for Progress 8 (2024). Two of the schools above, The Henrietta Barnett School and Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, are selective grammar schools; the guides linked here cover their entrance tests and admissions routes in full and are not repeated on this page, which is about GCSE results and tuition rather than entry at 11+.

Where Barnet Families Most Often Need GCSE Support

Two ways of reading the table above point to different conclusions, and both are worth stating precisely because they answer different questions. The spread between the borough's highest-attaining named school, The Henrietta Barnett School at 87.3, and its lowest-attaining named school, Friern Barnet School at 44.8, is 42.5 Attainment 8 points. That is a single-school-to-single-school comparison — the distance between the best and weakest result in the table — and on its own it overstates how the two types of school perform as groups, because most Barnet comprehensives score well above Friern Barnet School's figure.

The more representative comparison is between group averages, and this is Leading Tuition's own calculation, not a DfE-published figure. The mean Attainment 8 score across Barnet's three selective grammar schools — Henrietta Barnett (87.3), Queen Elizabeth's Barnet (85.6) and St Michael's Catholic Grammar (77.8) — is 83.57. The mean across the borough's ten named comprehensives, from Finchley Catholic High School (62.3) down to Friern Barnet School (44.8), is 54.83. The difference between those two means is 28.7 Attainment 8 points.

Progress 8 tells a different story from Attainment 8 alone. The Totteridge Academy, a non-selective comprehensive, recorded a 2024 Progress 8 score of 1.32 — higher than either of Barnet's grammar schools that year. A school's Attainment 8 ranking and its Progress 8 ranking measure different things: Attainment 8 describes the grades pupils leave with, Progress 8 describes how far they travelled to get there from their own starting point. Families choosing between Barnet schools, or deciding where extra support would help most, generally need to look at both figures rather than one.

Two named schools sit furthest below the borough average on both headline measures. Friern Barnet School recorded an Attainment 8 score of 44.8 in the 2025 results, against Barnet's own borough average of 56.7, and its grade 5+ English & maths rate of 29.6% was well under half the borough figure of 63.1%. Copthall School's Attainment 8 score of 47.4 and grade 5+ rate of 39.8% sit in a similar position. Neither school's 2024 Progress 8 score points to the same gap, though: Copthall's was 0.44, described by DfE as above average, and Friern Barnet's was 0, exactly DfE's own average band. Read together, the two schools furthest below Barnet's Attainment 8 average are still recorded as making average or above-average progress with the pupils they teach, which points toward targeted, subject-specific support rather than an assumption that either school is simply underperforming.

GCSE Subjects We Tutor for Barnet Families

Barnet's EBacc entry rate — the percentage of pupils sitting the full combination of English, maths, a science, a language and history or geography — was 58.9% in the 2025 results, well above the England state-funded average of 40.5% and close to Inner London's 57.1%, the highest of any English region. That entry pattern shapes what Barnet families most often ask us to cover, and our subject coverage follows it directly: Maths and English Language and English Literature, the double-weighted Attainment 8 components; Biology, Chemistry and Physics, whether a student is sitting combined or separate science; History and Geography, the EBacc's humanities pillar; and GCSE languages including French and Spanish.

That 58.9% entry rate is one of Barnet's more distinctive characteristics as a borough, not just a headline number. It means a majority of Barnet GCSE students sit all five EBacc pillars rather than a narrower combination, which is a meaningfully different subject spread from the national picture, where fewer than three pupils in five, 40.5%, do the same. Set against Inner London's 57.1%, the highest EBacc entry rate of any English region, Barnet's own figure edges slightly ahead of even its own region's best-performing area. For a family choosing tuition, that matters practically: a Barnet GCSE student is statistically more likely than a student in most of England to be juggling a full EBacc combination alongside their option subjects, which is why we build programmes around all five EBacc pillars as standard rather than treating languages or humanities as optional extras.

Whichever exam board a Barnet student's school uses — AQA, Edexcel, OCR or WJEC/Eduqas — our tutors work from that school's own specification and past papers rather than a generic GCSE syllabus, because grade boundaries and question styles differ between boards even for the same subject. See our full GCSE tuition service for how a programme is structured across a full academic year.

How Leading Tuition Works With Barnet GCSE Students

Every Barnet GCSE programme starts with a short diagnostic assessment against the student's own school and exam board, not a generic GCSE checklist, so a tutor can see immediately whether the priority is closing a specific topic gap, building exam technique under timed conditions, or working ahead of a school's own scheme of work. Our tutors hold degrees from leading UK universities and are matched to a student by subject, exam board and year group rather than by availability alone.

Sessions run one-to-one online, with a shared whiteboard that lets a tutor work through past-paper questions, mark answers against the real mark scheme, and share annotated resources in real time — the same working method whether a student attends one of Barnet's grammar schools or one of its comprehensives. Progress is reviewed against the student's own target grades at agreed intervals, and session notes are shared with parents after each lesson so support at home lines up with what happened in the tutorial.

All figures above are drawn from the Department for Education's Compare School and College Performance service and its Key Stage 4 performance, 2024/25 release, checked on 23 August 2026. Families researching Barnet tutoring more broadly can also see our overview of tutoring across Barnet.

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