GCSE Religious Studies Tutors in Birmingham 2026: Entry Ranges From 0% to 100%

Religious education is compulsory in every Birmingham school, but the GCSE built on it is not: Department for Education data for 2024/25 show 104 of the city’s secondary schools entering at least one pupil for GCSE Religious Studies, from 100% of a Year 11 cohort down to none. Religious character does not reliably predict which end a school sits at.

Do Birmingham schools have to teach religious education?

Yes, and the duty is specific. Section 80(1)(a) of the Education Act 2002 requires the curriculum at every maintained school in England to include “provision for religious education for all registered pupils at the school,” taught in accordance with the local agreed syllabus unless the school has a religious character, in which case Schedule 19 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 lets it teach denominationally instead. That duty binds Birmingham City Council’s maintained schools directly.

Academies are not bound by Section 80 — they sit outside the National Curriculum entirely — but the Department for Education writes the same obligation into every academy’s own contract. The curriculum clause of the current DfE model “Mainstream: supplemental funding agreement” states plainly: “The Academy Trust must provide for the teaching of religious education and a daily act of collective worship at the Academy.” A faith-designated academy instead follows a denominational clause tied to its specified religion, and its funding agreement separately requires it to comply with Section 71(1)-(6) and (8) of the 1998 Act “as if the Academy were a community, foundation or voluntary school.” Most of Birmingham’s 104 schools with a GCSE Religious Studies entry are academies, so it is this contractual route, not Section 80, that reaches them.

Parents keep a separate right regardless of school type. Section 71(1) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 says that if a parent “requests that he may be wholly or partly excused from receiving religious education given at the school in accordance with the school’s basic curriculum, the pupil shall be so excused until the request is withdrawn.” That right covers the compulsory RE lessons every pupil receives up to Year 11. It says nothing about the separate, optional decision a school makes about whether to enter pupils for the GCSE — which is the question the rest of this page answers, because teaching RE and entering the exam are not the same commitment, and Birmingham’s own schools show exactly how far apart they can sit.

How many Birmingham schools enter pupils for GCSE Religious Studies?

Department for Education school-level exam data for 2024/25 record at least one GCSE Religious Studies entry, under the qualification label “GCSE (9-1) Full Course,” at 104 of Birmingham’s secondary schools. Across those 104 schools, pupils were entered 8,686 times against a combined Year 11 population of 14,883 — an overall rate of 58.4% — but that city-wide figure hides a range that runs from every pupil to none at all.

At the top, King Edward VI Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy entered all 160 of its Year 11 pupils (100.0%), as did King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls (148 of 148) and Eden Boys’ School, Birmingham (122 of 122). The Arthur Terry School entered 267 of 270 (98.9%) and Ninestiles, an Academy entered 277 of 288 (96.2%). At the other end, Aston University Engineering Academy entered 1 pupil out of 81 (1.2%), Tile Cross Academy entered 1 of 104 (1.0%), and Redstone Academy for Boys entered 1 of 53 (1.9%). Fairfax, a special school with a Year 11 roll of 255, entered 10 pupils (3.9%).

Comparing entry rates across a school’s optional subjects is often the clearer signal — our Birmingham GCSE English tutors page sets out how the same schools handle a compulsory subject with a similarly essay-heavy, evaluative exam style. Three mainstream comprehensives entered nobody at all. Turves Green Boys’ School put its full cohort of 78 through GCSE Maths in the same year’s data but recorded zero Religious Studies entries. Wheelers Lane Technology College did the same across 131 pupils, and Birmingham Ormiston Academy, a specialist media and performing arts academy, entered none of its 186. None of the three is a special school or an alternative-provision setting — each is a mainstream secondary that fully discharges its legal duty to teach RE and simply chooses not to put anyone in for the exam. That gap between teaching a subject and examining it is the whole story this page is built to check, school by school, rather than assumed from the subject’s name.

One caution on the qualification label itself. AQA, OCR and WJEC Eduqas all still list a live GCSE (9-1) Religious Studies Short Course specification — a half-weighted qualification distinct from the full GCSE — and this page checks that market further down. But none of the 918 grade-level rows behind Birmingham’s 104 schools is filed under a Short Course label; every one reads “GCSE (9-1) Full Course.” That is a fact about how this dataset categorises entries, not proof that no Birmingham pupil sits the short course — DfE’s school performance tables may simply not break the two out separately at this level, so a family should still ask a specific school which route it runs.

Does a school’s religious character predict its GCSE Religious Studies entry rate?

Checked against the Get Information About Schools register — by URN, not by reading a name — Birmingham’s Roman Catholic schools form a strikingly consistent cluster. St Edmund Campion Catholic School enters 99.0% of pupils, Holy Trinity Catholic School 99.4%, Cardinal Wiseman Catholic School 99.3%, St Paul’s School for Girls 99.4%, Bishop Challoner Catholic College 93.2% and St John Wall Catholic School 92.1%. Even the lowest of the seven Catholic schools checked, Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School, still enters 83.5% — every one comfortably above the city’s 58.4% average. Birmingham’s designated faith schools of other characters follow the same pattern: Eden Boys’ School, Birmingham and Eden Girls’ Leadership Academy, Birmingham, both registered with GIAS as Muslim, enter 100.0% and 98.3% respectively; Nishkam High School, registered Sikh, enters 97.2%; and Ark St Alban’s Academy, registered Church of England despite a name that gives no hint of it, enters 99.4%.

That consistency makes it tempting to read religious character as the explanation. It is not, because the schools GIAS records as having no religious character span the entire range on their own. King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls, GIAS character “None,” enters 100.0% of its pupils — matching the strongest Catholic and Muslim schools in the city. At the same time, three schools with no religious character enter nobody at all: Turves Green Boys’ School, Wheelers Lane Technology College and Birmingham Ormiston Academy, all recorded “Does not apply” or “None” on the register. A single designation cannot be doing the work when it sits on both the highest and several of the lowest entry rates checked for this page.

A school’s name is an even worse guide than its designation — a caution worth carrying to any of our other subject pages under our city guides, not just this one. Four Birmingham schools whose names would suggest a specific faith carry no religious character code on GIAS at all. Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School — named for a Tudor bishop — is registered “None” and enters just 16.8% of pupils, one of the lowest rates among the city’s mainstream grammar schools. Al-Burhan Grammar School, an independent school, is likewise registered “None” despite its name, yet enters 93.9% — among the highest rates checked. Darul Uloom Islamic High School is also “None” on the register and enters 61.1%, above the city average but well below the Eden schools that do carry an official Muslim designation. Highclare School, an independent school with no faith reference in its name or its GIAS record, enters 9.3%. Four schools, four different entry rates, and not one of their names told a parent anything true about the code behind it — which is the reason this page checks the register directly rather than reading a school’s name and guessing.

Which exam boards offer GCSE Religious Studies, and is there still a short course?

All four English GCSE boards hold a live, current Ofqual registration for GCSE (9-1) Religious Studies, checked against Ofqual’s Register of Regulated Qualifications and each board’s own specification on 2 September 2026. AQA runs three separate specifications under one subject: Religious Studies A (8062, Ofqual number 601/8400/0), Religious Studies B (8063, 601/8401/2) and a Short Course (8061, 601/8399/8), each in its “September 2025” edition. OCR runs a single full-course specification, J625 (601/8594/6), built from five religion-specific routes — Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism — plus a Short Course, J125 (601/8712/8). Pearson Edexcel offers two full-course specifications, Religious Studies A (1RA0, 603/0079/6) and Religious Studies B (1RB0, 603/0063/2). WJEC Eduqas offers one qual code, C120QS (601/8879/0), split into Route A and a Catholic-specific Route B written with the Catholic Education Service for compliance with the Bishops’ Conference — a detail worth knowing given how many of Birmingham’s highest-entering schools are Catholic — plus its own live Short Course, C125QT (601/8880/7).

The short course is not dead, but it is not evenly held either. Pearson Edexcel’s two Short Course specifications — Religious Studies A (603/0062/0) and Religious Studies B (603/0118/1) — both carry a status of “No longer awarded” on Ofqual’s register, with an operational and certification end date of 31 August 2022. AQA, OCR and WJEC Eduqas have not withdrawn theirs: OCR’s short course paper, J125/01, was awarded real grade boundaries in the June 2026 series (a raw mark of 101 needed for a grade 9 out of 126), which only happens when candidates actually sit it. The same June 2026 OCR grade boundaries document also shows two of the five full-course religion options — J625/08, the Jewish-perspective paper, and J625/10, the Hindu-perspective paper — recorded “No Entries” that series, even though OCR still publishes both as live options. AQA’s own specification confirms its extended-writing structure directly: each five-part question carries “12 marks for AO1 and 12 marks for AO2,” with the 12-mark question also carrying up to three SPaG marks — the kind of extended, evaluative writing our national GCSE History tuition service also trains for in essay-based humanities exams.

Is Religious Studies part of the EBacc, and are the measures changing?

No. The English Baccalaureate’s humanities requirement is satisfied by history or geography, never Religious Studies, so a Birmingham school entering pupils for the EBacc measure gains nothing from also entering them for GCSE Religious Studies — the two sit in different parts of the timetable and neither substitutes for the other. That distinction matters because it is easy to assume RE’s compulsory status extends to the EBacc; it does not.

The EBacc measures themselves are also being retired. The government’s response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, published 5 November 2025, states: “In advance, we will remove EBacc headline and additional measures at key stage 4. This will take effect for the key stage 4 performance measures for the 2025 to 2026 academic year to be published in autumn 2026.” Any EBacc figure quoted for a Birmingham school today is therefore the 2024/25 measure, published under a framework the Department for Education has already confirmed will not continue into the following year’s tables.

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