Trinity Academy enters 87 pupils for GCSE History against just 31 for Geography -- a 45.5-point tilt -- while Oasis Academy Brislington runs the opposite way, 148 for Geography against 90 for History, DfE's 2025 data shows.
Book a Free ConsultationThe EBacc humanities pillar credits a Bristol pupil for entering GCSE Geography or History, never both, so which one a school pushes is a curriculum choice. Trinity Academy entered 87 of its 123-pupil 2025 cohort for History against just 31 for Geography -- a 45.5-point tilt. Oasis Academy Brislington runs the opposite way: 148 Geography entries against 90 for History on 250 pupils. Neither school appears on this site's GCSE History Bristol page.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppThe English Baccalaureate's humanities pillar is a pupil-level measure: a pupil is credited with entering it if they sit GCSE Geography or GCSE History, counted once even if their school enters them for both. That is a different number from how many pupils a school enters for Geography specifically, and this page keeps the two apart throughout -- Geography's own entry figures are the spine of what follows, with History's figures, already sourced on this site's GCSE History tutors in Bristol page, used only where a direct comparison is useful.
That pillar itself will not exist in its current form much longer. The government's response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, published 5 November 2025, states plainly: "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." The response also proposes replacing part of the current Attainment 8 structure with breadth slots drawn from three categories -- Humanities, Creative and Languages -- subject to consultation, which would loosen rather than preserve the strict "Geography or History, once" rule this page and its History sibling both describe for 2025. Any EBacc entry or achievement figure quoted for a Bristol school from this point on should be dated to the 2024/25 measure, not treated as an ongoing series.
The nine schools below are Bristol secondaries this page individually sourced 2025 GCSE Geography and History entry figures for from DfE's Compare School and College Performance service -- none of them among the 13 already covered on this site's GCSE History Bristol page. They are ranked by the same History-minus-Geography gap that page uses, so the two tables read as one continuous scale rather than two unrelated samples.
| School | Type | KS4 pupils (2025) | Geography entries | Geography rate | History entries | History rate | History − Geography |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oasis Academy Brislington | Academy | 250 | 148 | 59.2% | 90 | 36.0% | −23.2pp |
| Bristol Free School | Academy | 202 | 122 | 60.4% | 97 | 48.0% | −12.4pp |
| Blaise High School | Academy | 156 | 86 | 55.1% | 67 | 42.9% | −12.2pp |
| Redmaids' High School | Independent | 112 | 35 | 31.2% | 41 | 36.6% | +5.4pp |
| St Bernadette Catholic Secondary School | Voluntary Aided | 146 | 57 | 39.0% | 87 | 59.6% | +20.5pp |
| Bedminster Down School | Academy | 181 | 73 | 40.3% | 127 | 70.2% | +29.8pp |
| Ashton Park School | Academy | 214 | 62 | 29.0% | 127 | 59.3% | +30.4pp |
| The City Academy Bristol | Academy | 174 | 52 | 29.9% | 110 | 63.2% | +33.3pp |
| Trinity Academy | Academy (Free School) | 123 | 31 | 25.2% | 87 | 70.7% | +45.5pp |
Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance subjects-entered tables, 2025 key stage 4 results, retrieved 2 September 2026. Rates are this page's own calculation (entries divided by each school's published KS4 cohort), not a DfE-published percentage.
Whichever way your child's Bristol school leans -- deep into Geography, deep into History, or split close to evenly -- our GCSE Geography tutors start from the pupil's own board and completed enquiries, not a generic revision course.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppTrinity Academy's 45.5-point tilt toward History is wider than any gap reported on this site's GCSE History Bristol page, where Fairfield High School's 33.0-point tilt (134 History entries against 64 for Geography, on a 212-pupil cohort) was described as the largest either page had found. That description held for the 13 schools that page checked; Trinity Academy was not among them. Oasis Academy Brislington's 23.2-point tilt the other way likewise edges past St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School's previously widest Geography-favouring gap of 21.3 points. Put the two pages' schools together -- 22 in total -- and the combined range runs from Trinity Academy's +45.5pp to Oasis Academy Brislington's −23.2pp, a spread of at least 68.7 percentage points across schools within the same local authority.
By raw headcount, Oasis Academy Brislington's 148 Geography entries are also the highest this page or its History sibling has recorded at any Bristol school, ahead of Bristol Brunel Academy's 146. Neither page has checked all 48 Bristol secondaries on DfE's register, so this is the highest among the 22 schools sourced so far, not a citywide claim -- the same caution this page applies to every "most" or "widest" figure it publishes.
One pattern this page checked for and did not find: whether a school's overall EBacc entry rate predicts which way it leans on Geography versus History. Oasis Academy Brislington enters 86.4% of its cohort for the full EBacc -- the highest rate among Bristol's 48 secondaries -- and favours Geography strongly. Ashton Park School and Bedminster Down School sit at the opposite end, entering just 15.0% and 2.8% of their cohorts for the full EBacc respectively, and both favour History strongly, which might suggest a pattern. Blaise High School breaks it: a 25.6% EBacc entry rate, similar to the low-EBacc schools, but a Geography-favouring split. Nine schools is too small a sample to call this a mechanism, and an earlier round of research across nine other English cities found no consistent relationship between EBacc pressure and subject choice either -- so this page states the observation and stops there.
Redmaids' High School, an independent girls' school, entered 35 pupils for GCSE Geography and 41 for GCSE History against a 112-pupil 2025 cohort -- real, non-zero counts in both subjects. Yet DfE's headline table credits the school with 0.0% Entering EBacc, the same figure shown for three other Bristol independents already documented on this site's GCSE History page: Clifton College, Clifton High School and Bristol Grammar School. Those three record no GCSE-labelled Geography or History entries at all, so their 0% EBacc figure and their subject entries point the same way. Redmaids' High School does not fit that pattern -- its humanities entries are real, so something else is excluding it from EBacc.
The most likely explanation sits in the sciences, not the humanities. Redmaids' High School's full subjects-entered list records only ten "Science: Double Award GCSE" entries against its 112-pupil cohort, and no separate GCSE rows for Biology, Chemistry or Physics at all -- a pattern consistent with the IGCSE-reporting gap this site's GCSE History page already documents for Bristol Grammar School's science entries, where DfE's approved-qualifications list for performance tables does not capture the IGCSE routes some independent schools use instead. A pupil who sits IGCSE sciences at Redmaids' High School would still count in the Geography or History figures above -- those are GCSE-specific rows the school clearly does use -- but would not register for EBacc, which requires a qualifying science entry alongside the humanities pillar. This page has not confirmed the exact science qualification Redmaids' High School pupils sit; a family should ask the school directly rather than assume.
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If your child's Bristol school enters an IGCSE humanities or science route rather than the GCSE version, our Geography tutors work from that syllabus directly, not a generic GCSE course.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppNo. DfE's key stage 4 qualifications discount-codes register -- checked with openpyxl across every year tab from 2014 to 2028, rather than assumed from any board's own marketing -- lists exactly seven live GCSE (9-1) Geography qualifications in the tab governing the 2026 performance tables. AQA runs a single, undivided specification (QN 60184103, confirmed on AQA's own site as spec 8035, QAN 601/8410/3). Pearson Edexcel, WJEC Eduqas and Cambridge OCR each split into a Geography A and a Geography B with separate codes -- Edexcel's are 1GA0 and 1GB0, Eduqas's are C111QS and C112QS, and OCR's are J383 and J384. That is a different pattern from GCSE History, where only OCR splits into A and B and the other three boards each run one route. All seven Geography specifications also appear in the register's 2018-through-2028 tabs without a gap, so none has been withdrawn, and the register already carries every one of them through to the 2028 performance tables.
The register also caught a genuine rename mid-search: OCR's two Geography specifications are listed under the plain name "OCR" in every tab from 2018 to 2025, then switch to "Cambridge OCR" from the 2026 tab onward. That is not a DfE labelling quirk -- OCR's own current specification document confirms it directly: "As of September 2025, our name is Cambridge OCR." The qualification codes and content are unchanged; only the board's public name has moved. This page's GCSE History tutors in Bristol sibling documents the same OCR History A and B split (J410/J411) predating this rebrand. Full paper-by-paper marks, timings and fieldwork weightings for all seven Geography specifications -- including the Ofqual rule that fieldwork is "assessed through examination only" and worth at least 15% of the qualification, carried out in "at least two contrasting environments" -- are set out in detail on this site's main GCSE Geography exam boards and papers page, so this page does not repeat that table.
As this site's GCSE History Bristol page establishes, Bristol's state-funded schools entered 78.1% of their 4,131-pupil 2025 cohort for the EBacc humanities pillar, against 81.2% across England's state-funded schools (625,647 pupils) -- a 3.1-point gap on a like-for-like, state-funded basis. That figure sits above almost every individual school this page has sourced a Geography entry rate for on its own, which is expected: the pillar counts a pupil once whether they sit Geography, History, or both, so it will generally run higher than either subject's standalone rate at the same school.
Families in Bristol weighing GCSE Geography alongside other subjects can find our wider coverage through our GCSE maths tutors in Bristol, GCSE Biology tutors in Bristol, GCSE Chemistry tutors in Bristol and GCSE English tutors in Bristol pages. Our GCSE Geography tuition page covers the exam's topics, revision planning and how we teach it in more depth than fits here, and our geography tutor page sets out what a tutoring session actually involves. For families weighing Geography against other subjects earlier in a Bristol school career, our GCSE tuition hub sets out how we work across all GCSE subjects, and our UK tutoring locations page covers every city we work in beyond Bristol.
Our expert GCSE Geography tutors help students across Bristol prepare for whichever of the seven current specifications their school teaches, working from the pupil's own fieldwork enquiries rather than a generic case study.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppThe questions below cover the specifics parents ask most often once they know which way their own child's Bristol school leans on Geography versus History.
They sit at opposite extremes among the Bristol secondaries this page and its GCSE History sibling have individually sourced. Trinity Academy entered 87 pupils for GCSE History against just 31 for Geography in 2025 -- a 123-pupil cohort, so a 45.5 percentage-point tilt toward History, wider than any gap reported on this site's GCSE History Bristol page. Oasis Academy Brislington runs the opposite way: 148 Geography entries against 90 for History on a 250-pupil cohort, a 23.2-point tilt toward Geography.
Redmaids' High School recorded 35 GCSE Geography entries and 41 GCSE History entries against a 112-pupil 2025 cohort -- real, non-zero numbers in both subjects -- yet DfE's tables credit the school with 0.0% Entering EBacc. The likely explanation is the sciences, not the humanities: the school's subjects-entered list shows only ten "Science: Double Award GCSE" entries for 112 pupils, and no separate Biology, Chemistry or Physics GCSE rows at all, which would exclude most pupils from EBacc regardless of their History or Geography entry. This page has not confirmed the exact qualification those pupils sit instead; a family should ask the school directly.
No. 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 entry or achievement figure quoted for a Bristol school after that point refers to the last measure published under the old system, not a continuing series.
Seven. DfE's own key stage 4 qualifications discount-codes register, checked across every year tab from 2014 to 2028, lists exactly seven GCSE (9-1) Geography qualifications in the tab covering the 2026 performance tables: one from AQA (undivided), and a Geography A and a Geography B each from Pearson Edexcel, WJEC Eduqas and Cambridge OCR. All seven also appear in every tab from 2018 to 2028, so none has been withdrawn or is due to be.
As a written exam, on every current specification. Ofqual's subject-level conditions for GCSE Geography state fieldwork "will be assessed through examination only," worth at least 15% of the total assessment weighting, and require it to be carried out "in at least two contrasting environments." There is no coursework mark and nothing is submitted for separate assessment; the pupil is examined in writing on their own fieldwork enquiries and on unfamiliar data supplied in the paper. This site's main GCSE Geography page sets out the board-by-board paper structure in full.
Among the 22 Bristol secondaries this page and its GCSE History sibling have between them individually sourced a 2025 Geography figure for, Oasis Academy Brislington recorded the most: 148 entries against a 250-pupil cohort. That is higher than Bristol Brunel Academy's 146, the figure reported on this site's GCSE History Bristol page. Neither page has checked all 48 Bristol secondaries, so this is the highest among the schools sourced so far, not a citywide claim.
No. DfE has not calculated Progress 8 for the 2024/25 or 2025/26 key stage 4 cohorts, stating there is no key stage 2 assessment data available to set the baseline, because KS2 tests were cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic. A Progress 8 score quoted for a Bristol school against a 2025 Geography or History result belongs to an earlier cohort, not the pupils these entry figures describe.
The board has, not the qualification. OCR's own current specification document states: "As of September 2025, our name is Cambridge OCR." Geography A (Geographical Themes, J383) and Geography B (Geography for Enquiring Minds, J384) keep the same codes and content; DfE's discount-codes register reflects the new name from its 2026 performance-tables tab onward, having listed both as plain "OCR" every year from 2018 to 2025.
Whichever specification your child's Bristol school teaches -- AQA, Edexcel A or B, Eduqas A or B, or Cambridge OCR A or B -- our tutors build a programme around their actual board and completed fieldwork, not a generic one.
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