GCSE Maths Tutors in Birmingham: What the City's Own Results Show

Leading Tuition provides one-to-one GCSE maths tuition for students across Birmingham. In 2024/25, 52% of Birmingham pupils reached grade 5 or above in GCSE maths, against an England state-funded average of 53%, while the city's overall Attainment 8 score of 46.6 sat slightly above the national 46.1. The picture is mixed rather than uniformly weaker, and the school-level results below show exactly where.

Why does Birmingham beat England on Attainment 8 but trail it in maths alone?

Two Department for Education datasets carry Birmingham's 2024/25 Key Stage 4 results: a subject-level table for GCSE Mathematics specifically, and a wider set of Key Stage 4 accountability metrics covering Attainment 8 and its component parts. Read together, they do not tell one simple story, and the two halves of that story point in slightly different directions.

On the broadest measures, Birmingham does marginally better than England as a whole. The city's Attainment 8 score — the average points score across a pupil's best eight qualifications — was 46.6 in 2024/25, against an England state-funded figure of 46.1. The share of pupils reaching grade 5 or above in English and maths GCSEs combined was 45.4% in Birmingham, identical to the England figure of 45.4%. Birmingham's EBacc entry rate, at 47.6%, comfortably exceeds the England rate of 40.5%, and its EBacc average point score of 4.15 sits above the national 4.09.

Narrow the measure to maths on its own, and the position reverses by a small but consistent margin. 70% of Birmingham pupils reached grade 4 or above in GCSE maths in 2024/25, against 72% across England; 52% reached grade 5 or above, against 53% nationally. The Attainment 8 score for the maths element specifically was 9.0 in Birmingham against 9.1 in England, and the EBacc maths pillar's grade 5-or-above rate was 50.1% in Birmingham against 51.2% nationally. Every one of these gaps sits within one or two percentage points — not a large shortfall, and not one that shows up anywhere else in the curriculum — but it is real, and it is specific to maths rather than spread across every subject.

The two measures answer different questions, which is worth being precise about before comparing schools. Attainment 8 scores a pupil's best eight qualifications out of a maximum of 90 points across the whole curriculum, with English and maths each double-weighted; the "maths element" of that score isolates just the maths contribution, out of a maximum of 17.8 points for a single GCSE. The EBacc maths pillar, by contrast, is a simple percentage: what share of pupils cleared a specific grade threshold in maths as one of the five EBacc subject areas. A school can score well on one and only moderately on the other, depending on whether its strength lies in getting most pupils over a grade boundary or in pushing its strongest mathematicians to very high marks — which is exactly the distinction the school-by-school figures below make visible.

All of the local-authority figures above cover Birmingham's state-funded schools only. They exclude the city's independent schools — including King Edward's School Birmingham and King Edward's High School for Girls, both entirely separate institutions from the state-funded King Edward VI Foundation grammar schools discussed below — and they exclude pupils who arrived from overseas after these cohorts were first tracked.

One measure is missing from both datasets by design rather than omission. Progress 8 — which normally tracks how much progress pupils made against their starting point, rather than the outcome they ended on — cannot be calculated for any state-funded school in England for 2024/25 or 2025/26, Birmingham's included. The Department for Education's own explanation is that the pupils in these cohorts sat no Key Stage 2 tests, because those tests were cancelled during the Covid-19 disruption of 2020, leaving no baseline to measure progress against; no replacement measure was announced for either year. That is why Attainment 8, not Progress 8, is the basis for the school-by-school comparisons that follow.

What explains the 80-point gap between King Edward VI Camp Hill and E-ACT Shenley Academy?

Birmingham publishes Key Stage 4 performance data for 161 state-funded secondary schools, and the range between them is far wider than the city average on its own suggests.

At the top, King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls recorded an Attainment 8 score of 80.4 in 2024/25, with 98.0% of its 148 pupils reaching grade 5 or above in English and maths combined — against a citywide rate of 45.4%. Its Attainment 8 score for the maths element alone was 15.0, two-thirds higher than Birmingham's average of 9.0. Its sibling school, King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys, was close behind on most measures and ahead on one: an Attainment 8 score of 75.7, a maths-element score of 15.8 (the higher of the two schools on this specific measure), 96.6% of its 148 pupils reaching grade 5 or above in English and maths, and an EBacc entry rate of 82.4% against the city's 47.6%. Both schools sit within the King Edward VI Foundation, whose wider Year 9 admissions arrangements are a separate subject from the GCSE outcomes covered here.

At the other end of the same published table, E-ACT Shenley Academy — an 11-to-16 sponsor-led academy with 139 pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 in 2024/25, a standard comprehensive intake rather than an atypical one — recorded an Attainment 8 score of 31.6 and a maths-element score of 6.2, with 17.3% of its pupils reaching grade 5 or above in English and maths. Its EBacc entry rate was 20.1%, against 82.4% at King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys. Comparing Shenley's 17.3% directly against Camp Hill's 96.6% and 98.0% leaves an 80-point spread in the grade 5-or-above rate between the two ends of Birmingham's own published table — a gap that sits inside a single local authority whose overall average, on this measure, is 45.4%.

None of these figures describe how any school selects or admits pupils. King Edward VI Camp Hill's own entry routes are a separate subject and are not covered on this page.

For a family choosing where to focus GCSE maths support, that spread is the practical takeaway: a pupil at a school averaging close to the citywide 52% grade-5 rate is working against materially different odds from one at a school averaging in the high nineties, and the tuition that helps close that gap looks the same regardless of which school a child attends — targeted, regular practice on exactly the topics a mock exam or a teacher's report identifies as weak.

The EBacc entry figures point at a related but separate difference: 82.4% of King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys' pupils were entered for the full EBacc combination in 2024/25, against 20.1% at E-ACT Shenley Academy and 47.6% across Birmingham as a whole. EBacc entry is a curriculum decision each school makes for its cohort, not a maths-specific outcome, but it shapes how many pupils sit a maths GCSE inside a five-subject academic core rather than alongside a more vocational timetable — context worth knowing before comparing two schools' maths results directly against each other.

Leading Tuition's Birmingham GCSE maths tutors work from the same diagnostic starting point regardless of which end of the table above a pupil's school sits at: a review of recent mock papers and class assessments to identify the specific topics costing marks, then a programme built around closing those gaps rather than re-teaching the whole specification from the start. That approach applies equally to a pupil aiming to secure a first grade 4 pass and one aiming to move from a grade 7 toward an 8 or 9 — the target grade changes the material covered, not the method.

Why does an 18-point gap separate Birmingham's grade 4 and grade 5 maths pass rates?

The two grades that dominate every Birmingham GCSE maths figure above are grade 4 and grade 5, and the Department for Education is specific about what separates them: grade 4 is officially a "standard pass" and grade 5 a "strong pass". Both sit inside what used to be a single grade C under the pre-2017 system, which is one reason the distinction sometimes gets flattened in conversation even though the two grades are reported, and often used, quite differently.

In Birmingham, the gap between the two thresholds is not small. 70% of pupils reached grade 4 or above in GCSE maths in 2024/25, but only 52% reached grade 5 or above — an 18-percentage-point difference sitting entirely inside what is nominally a single old-style grade band. For a family with a child predicted a grade 4 in Year 11 maths, that 18-point gap is the practical stake: a grade 4 clears the minimum bar most Birmingham sixth forms and colleges set for continuing to study a subject that requires maths, while a grade 5 clears the higher bar a smaller number of academically selective sixth forms set instead. The same 18-point gap is where one-to-one tuition tends to do the most identifiable good, because it is a gap in specific topics — not general ability — that a targeted programme can close within a term or two rather than requiring a full GCSE course to be retaught.

The same boundary explains why a predicted grade sitting one mark either side of 4 or 5 matters more in practice than the headline percentages suggest. A pupil predicted a low grade 5 and a pupil predicted a high grade 4 can be separated by a handful of marks on a single paper, yet the two grades are read very differently by a sixth form, an employer or a college — one as a pass with no caveat attached, the other as a pass that some routes will still ask a student to retake or supplement. Nothing in the Department for Education's published data identifies which individual pupils sit on which side of that boundary in a given school; that is precisely the diagnostic work a tutor does at the start of a GCSE maths programme, using a pupil's own mock papers and topic-by-topic scores rather than a school or city average.

Why did Birmingham's GCSE maths grade 5 rate rise to 54% in 2023/24, then fall back to 52%?

Three consecutive years of Department for Education data are available for Birmingham's GCSE maths results, and they show a rise followed by a partial pullback rather than a steady movement in either direction.

The grade 5-or-above rate moved from 51% in 2022/23 to 54% in 2023/24 — the strongest of the three years — before falling back to 52% in 2024/25. The grade 4-or-above rate followed a flatter version of the same shape: 70%, then 71%, then 70%. The share of pupils achieving any pass at all, grade 1 or above, held constant at 97% across all three years, which means the movement in the headline figures is happening entirely at the higher end of the grade range — among pupils close to the grade 4/5 boundary discussed above — rather than at the bottom of the distribution.

Three years is a short run to call a trend either way, and the Department for Education's own guidance is cautious about reading too much into short time series affected by the pandemic-era grading changes of 2020 to 2022, when centre-assessed and teacher-assessed grades temporarily replaced sat exams nationally. What the data does rule out is a simple story of steady year-on-year improvement or steady decline: Birmingham's 2024/25 maths results were closer to where the city stood in 2022/23 than to the higher point in between. The 2023/24 rise to 54% and 51%-to-54%-to-52% shape also means a single year cannot be read as the start of a new direction, in either the optimistic or pessimistic sense, without at least one more year of data to confirm it.

For families planning tuition around results day, the practical reading is to start well before the final year of GCSE study — early in Year 10 rather than after Year 11 mock results — since the pupils closest to the grade 4/5 boundary discussed above are exactly the ones whose outcome moved most between these three years. A gap of two or three percentage points citywide is small when averaged across the city's 14,972 pupils, but for an individual child sitting close to that boundary it is the difference a term of focused preparation is built to close.

Every figure above comes from the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance release for the 2024/25 academic year or the DfE's Compare School and College Performance service, both published in 2026. For the mechanics that do not vary by postcode — exam boards, foundation and higher tier, grade boundaries — see our GCSE Maths guide; for Leading Tuition's wider presence in the city, see our Birmingham tuition guide and our maths tutoring service.

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