GCSE Geography Tutors in Cambridge: One School Enters 100%, Another Just 17.5%

GCSE Geography and GCSE History fill the same English Baccalaureate humanities slot at every Cambridge secondary, so a school’s Geography entries only make full sense read against its History entries. Department for Education data for 2024/25 puts Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology at one extreme, entering all 28 of its humanities pupils for Geography and none for History, against St Bede’s Inter-Church School’s 30 Geography entries and 141 for History. Cambridge-wide, per-school Geography entries run from 28 to 121.

How Many Cambridge Pupils Actually Sit GCSE Geography?

Department for Education school-level subject-entry data, published through Compare School and College Performance, records the actual number of pupils each Cambridge secondary entered for GCSE Geography and for GCSE History individually — not a combined rate. Sorted from the highest Geography count to the lowest, and set against each school’s own History entries and Key Stage 4 cohort size for direct comparison:

The range runs from 121 pupils at Chesterton Community College down to 28 at Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology (CAST) — and CAST’s low Geography count is not a sign of weak interest in the subject, since every one of its humanities pupils takes it. Summed across all eight schools, Geography entries reach 493 against 503 for History — almost level citywide — but that closeness hides an eight-way spread in which no single school splits close to evenly except North Cambridge Academy, where 41 Geography entries sit against 44 for History out of an 85-pupil combined pool.

Which Cambridge School Leans Hardest Toward Geography — and Which Barely Touches It?

Raw entry counts favour bigger schools automatically, so the more telling number is what share of a school’s combined Geography-and-History pupils Geography actually takes. Run that calculation across all eight schools and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology sits at an extreme no other school reaches: its 28 Geography entries are 100% of its own 28-pupil History-and-Geography pool, because it does not enter a single pupil for History. Out of the same 104-pupil cohort, that is simultaneously the city’s highest Geography share and its lowest History share — the two most extreme readings the data can produce, both at one school.

At the opposite end, St Bede’s Inter-Church School enters 30 of its combined 171 History-and-Geography pupils for Geography — 17.5%, the lowest Geography share of any Cambridge school that still offers both subjects. Coleridge Community College leans hardest toward Geography among schools offering both: 76 of its 106 combined entries, 71.7%, against 30 for History. Trumpington Community College and Chesterton Community College land close together, at 65.8% and 65.8% of their own combined pools respectively — two schools of very different sizes reaching a similar lean by coincidence, not by any shared cause. The Netherhall School (41.2% Geography) and Parkside Community College (43.8%) lean the other way, toward History, while North Cambridge Academy sits nearest the midpoint of any Cambridge school, at 48.2% Geography against 51.8% History.

Which Exam Board Does Each Cambridge School Actually Use for GCSE Geography?

Seven live GCSE Geography specifications currently run across four awarding bodies in England, and Cambridge’s schools are not confined to one. AQA runs just the one specification, code 8035 (Ofqual accreditation number 601/8410/3), set out on AQA’s own GCSE Geography specification page. Pearson Edexcel runs two: Geography A (1GA0, QN 601/8134/5) and Geography B (1GB0, QN 601/8135/7), both currently on editions dated September 2025 in Pearson’s own hosted specification PDFs. OCR, now trading as Cambridge OCR, also runs two: Geography A “Geographical Themes” (J383, QN 601/8310/X), first examined in 2018, and Geography B “Geography for Enquiring Minds” (J384, QN 601/8224/6), a wholly rewritten specification first taught from September 2025 with its first exam series not until summer 2027. WJEC Eduqas completes the set with its own Geography A (QAN 601/8152/7) and Geography B (QAN 601/8153/9).

Confirming which of these Cambridge’s own eight schools actually use is not something Department for Education entry data records — it has to be checked against each school’s own published materials. Parkside Community College’s own Year 10 and Year 11 course information document lists “Geography AQA 8035” directly, alongside its Coursebook and revision guide references — and, in the same document, “History Edexcel 1HI0”, a different board entirely for the other humanity at the same school. St Bede’s Inter-Church School’s own published revision guidance names “My Revision Notes Eduqas B revision guide” for its Geography course, confirming WJEC Eduqas Geography B as its specification. We could not confirm the exam board for Cambridge’s remaining six schools from materials published on their own websites, and a family should ask the school directly rather than assume a citywide default — there plainly isn’t one, even within a single school’s own two humanities subjects.

Is GCSE Geography Fieldwork Coursework, or Is It Examined?

Fieldwork is the one requirement that separates GCSE Geography from GCSE History, and it is worth being precise about how it actually counts toward a grade — because it is not assessed the way non-exam assessment works in other GCSE subjects. AQA’s own specification states plainly that fieldwork “must take place outside the classroom and school grounds on at least two occasions” and that “the two enquiries must be carried out in contrasting environments and show an understanding of both physical and human geography.” None of that fieldwork itself is marked as coursework. Instead, AQA examines it in Paper 3, Geographical Applications — a 1 hour 30 minute written exam worth 30% of the GCSE, built around a pre-release resources booklet issued 12 weeks before the exam.

Every other current specification follows the same pattern. Pearson Edexcel’s Geography A requires “two contrasting environments”, one from a river or coastal landscape and one from a central business district or rural landscape, then assesses the fieldwork through an externally-assessed written exam section in its Topic 7 paper; Geography B places its own fieldwork requirement inside Topic 6, examined not in its final paper but in Component 2 (Paper 2: UK Geographical Issues), Section C, alongside that paper’s physical and human landscape content. OCR’s Geography A assesses fieldwork within Component 03’s written paper, and its brand-new Geography B (J384, first taught from September 2025) splits fieldwork across two written components — Our Natural World and People and Society — each with its own fieldwork section, still a written paper in both cases. WJEC Eduqas is the only board with an extra wrinkle: alongside its own Component 3 written exam, the centre — the school, not the pupil — must separately submit a “fieldwork statement” to WJEC by 15 May of the year a cohort receives its award, confirming that genuine fieldwork actually took place. That statement is an administrative declaration the school makes, not a piece of marked student coursework, and it carries no marks of its own.

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Does a School’s Humanities Entry Rate Tell You Its Geography Entry Rate?

No, and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology shows exactly where reading one figure for the other goes wrong. CAST’s published humanities entry rate — the Department for Education measure covering pupils entering History or Geography or both — is 26.9% of its 104-pupil cohort. Its Geography entry rate, calculated directly from its own subject entries (28 pupils out of 104), is also 26.9%. At most schools these two figures diverge, because some pupils take History instead and others take both; at CAST they are identical only because the school enters nobody for History, so every humanities pupil is, by definition, a Geography pupil. That is a coincidence of CAST’s own curriculum, not a rule that holds anywhere else in the city.

Parkside Community College shows the more usual pattern: its humanities entry rate is 96.1% of its 128-pupil cohort — among the highest in Cambridge — yet its Geography-only entry rate is 63/128, or 49.2%, because the rest of that 96.1% is made up of its 81 History entries. A parent reading only the headline humanities figure for either school would have no way to tell, without the separate subject-entry data this page draws on, whether a high humanities rate means heavy Geography, heavy History, or a genuine mix of both.

Is the EBacc Humanities Measure Changing?

Yes, and the timing matters for how long the figures on this page should be treated as current. The Department for Education’s own November 2025 response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review 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.” That means the humanities entry rate figures used on this page — drawn from the 2024/25 measure, the most recent published — describe a measure the Department has already confirmed it will stop reporting after this cycle. Any EBacc humanities figure for a Cambridge school beyond the 2025/26 academic year should be treated as historical rather than an ongoing series.

We have not found a consistent link between a school’s EBacc entry rate and which of History or Geography it favours. Parkside Community College has the second-highest EBacc entry rate in the city, 85.9%, and leans mildly toward History (43.8% Geography); Coleridge Community College has a much lower EBacc entry rate, 72.7%, yet leans harder toward Geography (71.7%). Schools with strong overall EBacc entry tend to enter pupils for more subjects across the board, which is a confound rather than a cause — and with only eight schools in the comparison, this page does not attempt to state a correlation between the two measures.

What This Means for Choosing GCSE Geography Support in Cambridge

A 121-pupil Geography cohort and a 28-pupil one need different things from a tutor, so which of Cambridge’s eight schools a child attends matters more here than in most subjects. Chesterton, Coleridge and Trumpington put Geography ahead of History by a clear margin, which means large year groups sitting the same paper, shared mock timetables, and a reasonable chance that past-paper resources circulating locally match the school’s own board. Reverse that at St Bede’s or Netherhall, where History is the bigger subject: a Geography pupil there is one of a smaller group, and a revision plan pitched at a national average is liable to assume the wrong board or the wrong fieldwork format. CAST sits outside this spectrum entirely, since Geography is not competing with History there at all — a function of the school’s university-technical-college status and its Year 9 entry point, not of pupil demand.

What this page cannot tell a family is which topic options, case studies or fieldwork locations sit inside any of these eight schools’ own schemes of work — DfE's entry data stops at the subject level, and only Parkside's and St Bede's boards were confirmed directly from published school materials during this research. Below that level of detail, the school itself is the only reliable source, and a family should ask it directly rather than infer from a sibling school or a national average.

Cambridge’s Eight State Secondaries in the Wider County

Cambridge has no education authority of its own: all eight schools in this comparison return their Department for Education figures through Cambridgeshire County Council, an authority whose boundary reaches well beyond the city into towns such as St Neots, March and Chatteris. Set against the county's own 2024/25 Key Stage 4 total of 6,836 pupils — and a national state-funded figure of 625,647 — the eight Cambridge schools add up to 1,104 pupils between them, 16.1% of everyone Cambridgeshire put through Year 11 that year: St Bede’s Inter-Church School, The Netherhall School, Parkside Community College, Chesterton Community College, North Cambridge Academy, Coleridge Community College, Trumpington Community College and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology.

One further Cambridge school does not appear anywhere in the figures above. Castle School, on Courtney Way, is listed on the Department for Education’s own Get Information about Schools register (URN 134972) as a community special school, not a mainstream secondary, so it sits outside every mainstream subject-entry table this page draws on, GCSE Geography included.

Eight schools, two exam boards confirmed so far, and a fieldwork requirement examined seven different ways is not a picture that supports a single citywide Geography plan, which is why Leading Tuition starts from one child's own school rather than a template. Readers wanting the full board-by-board paper structure and grade boundaries behind the codes named above should see our GCSE Geography boards and papers guide, alongside our GCSE Geography tuition page; our Geography tuition and History tuition pages describe what a programme in each humanity looks like on its own terms. The matching GCSE History tutors in Cambridge page carries this same city's History entries in full, our 16+ tuition in Cambridge guide picks up after GCSE for pupils continuing into A-level Geography, and tutoring across Cambridge is our overview of the city as a whole.

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