GCSE Statistics Tutors in Bristol: 5 of 39 DfE-Listed Schools

GCSE Statistics is an optional extra GCSE that five of the 39 schools in the Bristol, City of local authority listed in the Department for Education's 2024/25 school-level subject file entered pupils for. Bristol Brunel Academy recorded 59 entries, E-Act Merchants' Academy 27, E-Act Montpelier High School 18, Bristol Metropolitan Academy 17, and the independent Badminton School 10. The four state-funded schools among them account for all 121 of Bristol's state-funded pupil entries that year.

Which of the 39 Bristol Schools in DfE's 2024/25 Subject File Entered GCSE Statistics?

The Department for Education publishes a school-level subject file alongside its key stage 4 statistics, recording how many entries each school made in each subject. Thirty-nine schools in the Bristol, City of local authority appear in the 2024/25 edition of that file. Five of them have a GCSE Statistics row. Every one of those five entries is a GCSE (9-1) Full Course; running the same query with no qualification filter at all returns the same five schools, so none of the 39 enters the subject under any other qualification type.

Source: DfE key stage 4 school-level subject data for 2024/25, read 17 September 2026, with each school's status taken from its own Get Information about Schools record the same day.

One name needs care. DfE's subject file lists URN 151302 as E-Act Merchants' Academy, but the Get Information about Schools record for that same URN gives the school's name as E-ACT Bristol Academy South, open since 1 September 2024, with Merchants' Academy, URN 135597, recorded as its predecessor. E-Act Montpelier High School, URN 151303, opened on the same date with Montpelier High School, URN 135581, as its predecessor. A parent looking the first school up under the name printed in the data will not find it, which is why both names are given here.

What the query settles, and what the reconciliation only corroborates

Two questions are worth keeping apart. The first is what the file itself returns, and the answer to that is direct: querying the institution-level file for the Bristol, City of local authority, with no qualification filter applied, returns those five Statistics rows and no others. That enumerates every school in the authority with a published GCSE Statistics entry, and it is the claim this page makes.

The second question is whether a school could be entering pupils without appearing in the file at all, and there the evidence is corroborating rather than conclusive. DfE's local-authority file gives Bristol 121 GCSE Statistics pupil entries in 2024/25 across state-funded schools. The four state-funded schools in the table above -- Bristol Brunel Academy's 59, E-Act Merchants' Academy's 27, E-Act Montpelier High School's 18 and Bristol Metropolitan Academy's 17 -- sum to exactly 121, leaving nothing over. That is consistent with the file having captured every state-funded entry in the city, and it is the strongest check available on this data, but it is not a proof.

The same arithmetic closes on a second subject in Bristol. Across the 30 Bristol schools in the file with GCSE Mathematics entries, the entries sum to 4,104. Take away the 119 entries at the four independent schools in that group -- Collegiate School 86, LPW Independent School 21, Belgrave School 10 and Grace Garden School 2 -- and 3,985 remain -- exactly the local-authority figure DfE publishes for Bristol's state-funded GCSE Mathematics entries in the same year. Two subjects, two exact matches, from two files compiled separately.

That agreement is not guaranteed, and the authorities where it fails are what make it corroboration rather than proof. The same pair of files does not close everywhere. In Reading, the 13 school rows for GCSE Mathematics sum to 1,614 against a local-authority total of 1,610, and one of those 13, OneSchool Global Reading Senior Campus, is an independent school with 6 entries, so the state-funded rows come to 1,608 and the two figures cannot be made to agree in either direction. Since the two files can evidently sit on slightly different bases, an exact match in Bristol is consistent with nothing having been missed rather than a demonstration that nothing was.

There is a reason the two can diverge, and it sits in the metadata rather than anywhere obscure. The school-level file counts a different thing from the local-authority file: its indicator is "Number of entries at grade", read at the grade "Total exam entries", while the local-authority file's indicator is "Number of pupils achieving the grade", read at the grade "Total pupil entries". Exam entries and pupil entries are not the same definition, and DfE's key stage 4 methodology is explicit about what follows: the national and local-authority figures in its statistical releases and the school-level data "will match when comparing measures with the same definition". Bristol's agree exactly on both Statistics and Mathematics even though the two definitions are not the same. That is why the match is worth reporting, and, for the same reason, why it stops short of proof.

Suppression does not explain a missing row either. DfE's key stage 4 methodology states that suppression applies only where an aggregation covers only one school, and that cells containing a single pupil were not suppressed. The school-level file bears that out for Bristol directly: it publishes a GCSE Mathematics entry count of 1 for Elmfield School for Deaf Children and 2 for Grace Garden School, both far below any threshold that would hide a small Statistics entry.

Among the 18 state-funded mainstream schools in the set with no Statistics row are several of the city's largest key stage 4 cohorts, including Redland Green School, Cotham School and St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School. Bristol Brunel Academy, which entered more pupils for GCSE Statistics than any other school in the city and nearly half of the 131 entries made across all five, is also the school our Bristol GCSE maths page identifies as having the lowest maths element of Attainment 8 among the three schools it compares. Both statements are true of the same school in the same year and nothing in DfE's data links them; they are recorded here side by side rather than as cause and effect.

How Bristol's Local-Authority GCSE Statistics Entries Moved Across the Seven Years DfE Publishes

DfE's local-authority subject data runs from 2018/19 to 2024/25, which gives Bristol a seven-year series. It does not describe a trend. Entries rise, fall for two years, rise for two more, then fall by almost half.

Source: DfE key stage 4 local-authority subject data, Bristol, City of, read 17 September 2026. Share column derived from the raw entry counts in the two columns beside it.

Two of those seven years were counted under a different rule

Before any of this is read as movement in what Bristol's schools chose to teach, two years have to be set aside, and the reason is more specific than the cancelled exams everyone remembers. DfE's key stage 4 methodology records the return of first entry discounting rules after the use of best entry discounting in 2019/20 and 2020/21. Discounting is the rule that decides which of a pupil's entries in a subject is counted at all, and it was different in exactly those two years: a pupil entered twice had their best result counted, where in 2018/19 and earlier the first entry was the one that counted. The rule then changed back.

The grading arrangements moved in the same two years. Summer exams were cancelled for 2019/20 and 2020/21, with grades determined first by centre assessment and then by teacher assessment, and the schools checking exercise was cancelled for a second year running, so the 2020/21 data was never confirmed by schools. DfE states plainly that 2020 and 2021 data should not be compared to previous years' attainment data for the purposes of measuring changes in pupil performance, and although that sentence is written about attainment rather than about entry counts, the discounting change above bears on the counts directly.

DfE resolves the problem for its own release by choosing a baseline rather than a line: comparisons are made with 2024 and with 2019, the department says, because 2019 was the last year that summer exams were taken before the COVID-19 pandemic. On that basis Bristol's comparison is 91 entries in 2018/19 against 121 in 2024/25 -- 30 more, an increase of about a third between the first and last years DfE publishes, with everything in between too unstable to read as direction. The single largest movement in the series is the most recent one: 228 entries in 2023/24 fell to 121 in 2024/25, a drop of 107. DfE's school-level subject file exists for 2024/25 only, in all three of its published versions, so that fall cannot be attributed to any named school, and this page does not attempt to.

Bristol's Local-Authority Statistics Entries Set Against Its Own Maths Entries, and England's

An entry count on its own says as much about the size of a city as about its appetite for a subject. The useful comparison is against the same authority's GCSE Mathematics entries in the same year, because almost every pupil at the end of key stage 4 is entered for Maths, and GCSE Statistics is designed to sit alongside it rather than replace it.

In 2024/25 Bristol's state-funded schools recorded 121 GCSE Statistics entries against 3,985 GCSE Mathematics entries. That is about one Statistics entry for every 33 Maths entries. Across England's state-funded schools in the same year the figures were 31,402 and 606,761, which is about one in 19. Bristol enters the subject at a little under three-fifths of England's rate. Put the other way round, had Bristol's schools entered pupils at England's rate, its 3,985 Maths entries would imply about 206 Statistics entries rather than the 121 recorded, a gap of 85 entries.

The seven-year comparison points the same way. England's state-funded GCSE Statistics entries went from 12,680 in 2018/19 to 31,402 in 2024/25, roughly two and a half times as many. Bristol went from 91 to 121, about a third more. Whatever is driving more schools nationally to timetable the subject has reached Bristol thinly, and in 2024/25 it had reached four state-funded schools.

Three cautions belong with those figures. They are entries, not pupils sitting exams on a given day, and they count pupils at the end of key stage 4 in state-funded schools, which is the scope DfE's own data set record states. The local-authority totals include special schools: 31 of Bristol's 3,985 GCSE Mathematics entries were made at four state-funded special schools, none of which recorded any Statistics entry. And the England figure here is DfE's state-funded England count, which is a narrower scope than the UK-wide, all-centres totals published by JCQ; our national GCSE Statistics guide carries the JCQ series and the qualification's boards, codes and grade profile, and this page does not restate them.

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Which of the Eight Independent Mainstream Bristol Schools in DfE's 2024/25 File Enter GCSE Statistics?

Bristol has a substantial independent sector, and a point worth making plainly is that DfE's school-level subject file does include independent schools, even though the local-authority totals used above cover state-funded schools only. Eight independent mainstream schools in the Bristol, City of local authority appear in the 2024/25 file: Badminton School, Bristol Grammar School, Clifton College, Clifton High School, Collegiate School, LPW Independent School, Queen Elizabeth's Hospital and Redmaids' High School. Two independent special schools, Belgrave School and Grace Garden School, are in the same file, which makes ten independent schools in the authority altogether.

One of the eight mainstream schools has a GCSE Statistics row, and neither independent special school does. Badminton School recorded 10 entries against a key stage 4 cohort of 61, and its Get Information about Schools record confirms it as an open other independent school in Bristol, City of, checked on 17 September 2026. Those 10 entries are the whole of the difference between the 131 entries recorded across all five Bristol schools with a Statistics row and the 121 recorded at local-authority level, which is another way of seeing that the local-authority figure is state-funded only.

For the other nine the correct answer is weaker than a zero, and it is worth saying why rather than implying otherwise. The same file records no GCSE Mathematics entries at all for six of the eight independent mainstream schools; Collegiate School, with 86 entries, and LPW Independent School, with 21, are the two exceptions. Four of those six -- Bristol Grammar School, Clifton College, Queen Elizabeth's Hospital and Redmaids' High School -- have key stage 4 cohorts of more than a hundred, so a GCSE file recording no maths entry for them is capturing only part of what they enter. Their coverage in this data is partial, so an absent Statistics row for an independent Bristol school is weaker evidence still than for a state-funded one, where at least a local-authority total exists to check the school rows against. Our Bristol GCSE maths page names four of the eight mainstream ones -- Bristol Grammar School, Clifton College, Clifton High School and Redmaids' High School -- and explains why independent schools sit outside the local-authority results it uses.

Does GCSE Statistics Count Towards the EBacc a Bristol School Is Measured On?

It does not, and that is checkable rather than a matter of opinion. In the school and college performance tables the English Baccalaureate is a measure of entry and attainment at key stage 4 in English, maths, science, a language, and history or geography, and a qualification counts towards it only if it appears on DfE's published list of eligible qualifications. That list, last updated on 18 June 2026, is a workbook with separate sheets for the English, English Literature, Maths, Science, Humanities and Languages pillars. No sheet in it carries a Statistics qualification. Its Maths sheet, headed "Qualifications counting as maths in the English Baccalaureate, and as EBacc maths in Progress 8 and Attainment 8", lists the GCSE Mathematics specifications from AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC Eduqas, alongside AS-level Mathematics and Further Mathematics, and nothing that a Statistics entry could be folded into.

That matters to a Bristol family reading an options booklet because it explains the shape of the choice rather than any particular school's reasons. GCSE Statistics is an additional GCSE that takes an options slot and returns nothing to the EBacc measure a secondary school is reported against. Four Bristol state-funded schools ran it in 2024/25 anyway, and the largest of those entries, Bristol Brunel Academy's 59, was made by a school whose whole key stage 4 cohort that year was 251 pupils. Nothing in DfE's data says why any of the four chose to, and this page does not guess.

The practical consequence for a pupil is the opposite of the accountability one. A pupil taking GCSE Statistics is taking a full, separately certificated GCSE alongside GCSE Maths, examined by AQA or Pearson Edexcel; our guides to AQA GCSE Statistics and Edexcel GCSE Statistics set out each board's paper structure, formula sheets and grade boundaries. What the EBacc position changes is how visible the subject is in a school's published measures, not what the qualification is worth to the pupil who holds it.

Where Tuition Fits for a Bristol GCSE Statistics Student

The data above splits Bristol families into two situations, and they need different things. A pupil at one of the four state-funded schools running the subject, or at Badminton School, is being taught it in timetabled lessons and needs support that tracks their own school's board and scheme of work. A pupil at one of the 18 state-funded mainstream schools in the same file with no Statistics row has no entry recorded for their school, and the question there is whether the qualification is worth taking another way.

Our expert GCSE Statistics tutors help students across Bristol on both the AQA and Pearson Edexcel specifications, working through the statistical enquiry cycle, the sampling and probability content and the papers' data-handling questions alongside a pupil's GCSE Maths rather than in place of it. Every programme starts from which board a student's school enters, which tier they are on in Maths, and how the two subjects are timetabled against each other, because Statistics is designed to be co-taught with Maths and the overlap is where revision time is most easily wasted twice.

For a pupil whose Bristol school does not run the subject, the route is a private-candidate entry through an approved centre, and our national GCSE Statistics guide quotes the specification wording that governs it, including the rules for a school registering as a centre for the first time. That is an administrative question as much as an academic one, and it is worth settling before a pupil starts a course rather than after. Families weighing the subject alongside the rest of a Bristol GCSE programme can also read our Bristol GCSE maths guide and our overview of tutoring across Bristol.

DfE's Compare School and College Performance service, whose page for Bristol Brunel Academy carried the service's own notice on 17 September 2026 that it will close and be replaced from autumn 2026, is where a family can check what else their child's school publishes. The subject-level entries used throughout this page come from DfE's key stage 4 performance release for 2024/25, its published methodology and its data guidance, all read on 17 September 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions About GCSE Statistics in Bristol