GCSE History Tutors in Bristol: Which Humanity Bristol's Schools Actually Push

For the English Baccalaureate, a pupil must enter history or geography -- the two subjects compete for the same single slot. Fairfield High School entered 134 pupils for GCSE History against 64 for Geography in 2025; St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School shows the opposite pattern, 115 for Geography against 69 for History. This page tracks both subjects, school by school, across Bristol's thirteen largest key stage 4 cohorts in DfE's 2025 data.

The EBacc Counts History or Geography -- Not Both, and Not Ancient History

The English Baccalaureate is a pupil-level measure, not a subject measure: a pupil is credited with the "humanities" pillar if they enter for history or geography, and counted once in that pillar even if their school enters them for both. That is a different question from how many pupils a school enters for GCSE History specifically, and the two numbers should never be presented as the same thing. St Bede's Catholic College makes the distinction concrete: 58 pupils sat GCSE History and 100 sat GCSE Geography in 2025, summing to 158 -- yet DfE's own humanities-pillar measure credits the school with only 72.6% of its 208-pupil cohort, or roughly 151 pupils, entering either subject. The 7-pupil gap between 158 and roughly 151 is explained by pupils entered for both History and Geography, who count once in the pillar but twice across the two subject totals -- a real, measurable overlap rather than a rounding artefact.

GCSE History is also its own qualification, distinct from two subjects it is sometimes confused with. Cotham School's 2025 results list 75 entries for GCSE History and a separate 11 entries for GCSE Ancient History -- two different rows in the same table, because they are two different qualifications with two different DfE codes. GCSE Classical Civilisation is a third, separate qualification again: Clifton College (5 entries), Orchard School Bristol (22), Fairfield High School (19) and Bristol Grammar School (30) all recorded standalone Classical Civilisation entries in 2025, alongside or instead of GCSE History. A tutor working from a school's own subject list needs to know which of the three a pupil is actually sitting, because the content, exam board and specification code all differ.

Unlike GCSE Maths or the three sciences, GCSE History carries no foundation/higher tier split. Every pupil sits the same paper and is eligible for the full 9-to-1 grade range, on whichever exam board their school has chosen -- one fewer planning decision for a tutor than in a tiered subject, but no less reason to know the specification in detail.

Which Exam Board Sets Bristol's GCSE History Papers?

Four awarding bodies offer GCSE History in England, and each has confirmed its own specification code directly. AQA's GCSE History specification is 8145. Pearson Edexcel's is Level 1/Level 2 GCSE (9-1) in History, specification 1HI0 -- a code that does not appear on Edexcel's own webpage for the qualification at all, only inside the specification PDF itself, on its cover page ("Pearson Edexcel Level 1/Level 2 GCSE (9-1) in History (1HI0)", Issue 6, first teaching from September 2016). OCR offers two separate GCSE History specifications, not one: History A, Explaining the Modern World (J410), and History B, the Schools History Project (J411) -- different specifications with different topic structures, not two names for the same course. WJEC Eduqas's own reference-codes table lists GCSE History's Qual Code as C100QS, alongside qualification number (QN) 601/8239/8 -- the only two codes the table shows for this qualification.

Which board a given Bristol school uses is set by that school rather than nationally, and it is not something DfE's performance tables publish -- a family needs to check with the school directly, or ask a tutor to confirm it from the pupil's own past papers and mark schemes. The period and depth-study options within a specification vary enormously by board -- Nazi Germany, Elizabethan England, Medicine Through Time and the American West are all live options across different boards' GCSE History courses -- and which options a particular Bristol school actually teaches sits on that school's own curriculum pages, not in DfE's data, so this page does not attempt to list them school by school.

Which Bristol Schools Push History Over Geography -- Or the Reverse?

The thirteen Bristol secondaries below are the schools this page individually sourced separate GCSE History and Geography entry figures for in DfE's 2025 subjects-entered data -- schools with a substantial recorded entry in at least one of the two subjects, not a complete count of every Bristol secondary. They are ranked by the gap between each school's History entry rate and its Geography entry rate, from the strongest lean toward History to the strongest lean toward Geography, which is a different ordering from either subject's raw headcount alone.

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.

By raw headcount rather than rate, Bristol Brunel Academy enters the most pupils for GCSE History of any school this page checked -- 137, against a 251-pupil cohort -- and very nearly as many for Geography (146), so both subjects run close to universal at that school even though its History-minus-Geography gap (−3.6 points) looks unremarkable. Fairfield High School sits at the opposite extreme on both measures: its 33.0-percentage-point History lead is the largest tilt this page found in either direction, driven by History reaching 63.2% of the cohort while Geography reaches barely half that share. Applying DfE's own humanities-pillar entry rate at Fairfield (83.5% of 212 pupils, or roughly 177) against the school's combined 198 History-plus-Geography entries implies at least 21 pupils sat both subjects -- a smaller overlap than the raw subject totals alone would suggest, but still a real one.

Bristol Metropolitan Academy shows the same History-favouring pattern as Fairfield but from a much lower base: DfE's humanities pillar credits the school with only 53.5% of its 215-pupil cohort entering either subject -- the lowest rate this page found at any Bristol school with recorded entries, and well below both the Bristol and England averages discussed below. Within that lower total, History alone (90 entries, 41.9%) accounts for most of the humanities pillar, implying the overlap between History and Geography entries at this school is comparatively small: 90 plus 33 sums to 123, against a pillar-implied 115 pupils, so at most 8 pupils are entered for both.

Does Entering History or Geography Mean a Pupil Achieves It?

Entering for a subject and achieving in it are different DfE measures, and Compare School and College Performance keeps them on separate pages for a reason. St Bede's Catholic College enters 100% of the pupils who sit History or Geography-adjacent humanities subjects (a school-level entry figure), yet its humanities achievement rate -- the percentage of those entered pupils reaching grade 5 or above -- is 76.2%, comfortably ahead of both the Bristol local-authority average (53.7%) and the England state-funded average (51.3%). Bristol Brunel Academy shows the opposite pairing: a high humanities entry rate (86.9% of its 251-pupil cohort, the highest this page checked) alongside a humanities achievement rate of just 39.9% at grade 5 or above -- well below both the Bristol average (53.7%) and the England state-funded average (51.3%). A high entry rate and a high achievement rate are not the same fact, and a family judging a school on one alone would miss the other entirely.

Neither of these achievement figures should be confused with Progress 8, which DfE has not calculated for the 2024/25 or 2025/26 key stage 4 cohorts at all -- the Department states plainly that "there is no KS2 assessment data available to calculate the baseline for Progress 8 for these years" because Key Stage 2 tests were cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic. Any Progress 8 figure quoted for a Bristol school against a 2025 History or Geography result refers to an earlier, different cohort, not the pupils these entry figures describe.

Why Do Three Bristol Independent Schools Record No GCSE History or Geography At All?

Clifton College, Clifton High School and Bristol Grammar School -- three of Bristol's independent secondaries -- list no GCSE-labelled History or Geography entries whatsoever in DfE's 2025 subjects-entered data. Clifton College's cohort is 161 pupils and Clifton High School's is 74; both schools' subject lists run to two dozen or more other GCSE subjects, but neither includes a History or Geography row. Bristol Grammar School's list is shorter still, and omits GCSE-labelled English, Maths and the three sciences too, alongside History and Geography.

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The most likely explanation, consistent with a pattern DfE's own tables already show for Bristol Grammar School's science entries, is that these schools teach history and geography through IGCSE routes that fall outside DfE's approved-qualifications list for performance measures, rather than not teaching the subjects at all. This page cannot confirm that from DfE data alone, and has not checked each school's own curriculum pages to verify it -- a family considering any of these three schools for History or Geography should ask the school directly which qualification, if any, its pupils actually sit.

Does Bristol's Humanities Entry Rate Keep Pace With England?

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) -- both figures are state-funded, so the 3.1-percentage-point gap is a genuine like-for-like comparison, not a population mismatch. DfE reports Bristol's independent schools, including Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, Clifton College and Clifton High School, as separate rows rather than folding them into this local-authority figure, which is one reason the three zero-entry independent schools discussed above do not depress the state-funded average.

Overall EBacc entry -- all five pillars together, not humanities alone -- shows far more spread between individual Bristol schools than the humanities figure alone suggests. St Bede's Catholic College enters 19.2% of its cohort for the full EBacc, against a Bristol average of 35.8% and an England state-funded average of 40.5%; Fairfield High School enters 36.3%, just below the Bristol average and closer to the England figure. Both schools sit well above the equivalent England averages on humanities alone (St Bede's 72.6% and Fairfield's 83.5%, against England's 81.2%), which confirms that a school's overall EBacc entry rate and its humanities-specific entry rate are separate figures that can move independently of one another.

Bristol families weighing GCSE History alongside other subjects can find our wider Bristol GCSE coverage through our GCSE maths tutors in Bristol, GCSE English tutors in Bristol, GCSE Biology tutors in Bristol, GCSE Chemistry tutors in Bristol and GCSE Physics tutors in Bristol pages. Our main GCSE History tuition page covers the exam's structure, source-analysis skills and revision planning in more depth than fits here, and our GCSE Geography tuition page covers Geography's own specification directly, for families weighing the two subjects against each other. For families 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.

The questions below cover the specifics parents ask most often once they know which subject, exam board and specification their own child's Bristol school actually enters them for.

Frequently Asked Questions