GCSE Religious Studies Tutors in Cambridge (2026): The School Where Almost Everyone Sits It

Cambridge’s eight state secondary schools enter between 0 and 173 pupils each for GCSE Religious Studies, and the gap tracks something specific. Department for Education data for 2024/25 shows St Bede’s Inter-Church School enters 173 of its 180-pupil cohort — 96.1% — while Coleridge Community College and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology enter none at all. St Bede’s is also the only one of the eight with a recorded religious character.

Does Every Cambridge School Have to Teach GCSE Religious Studies?

Every maintained school in England must provide religious education for all registered pupils. Section 80(1)(a) of the Education Act 2002 sets this out in exactly these words: the basic curriculum for every maintained school “shall comprise… provision for religious education for all registered pupils at the school.” That duty is separate from, and does not depend on, whether the school enters a single pupil for the GCSE. Gov.uk’s own plain-English guidance makes the distinction directly: “Children also need to study… religious education (RE). They will not take exams in these subjects — except RE, which is an optional GCSE subject.”

None of Cambridge’s eight state secondaries is a maintained school in the sense section 80 uses, though. GIAS records every one of them as an academy — six as an “Academy converter” or “Academy sponsor led”, and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology as a “University technical college” — so section 80 does not bind any of them by its own text, whatever their names (Chesterton, Coleridge, Parkside and Trumpington “Community College” among them) still suggest. Their duty instead runs through each academy’s own funding agreement with the Secretary of State, which is why gov.uk’s national curriculum guidance states the requirement separately for this school type: “Academies must teach a broad and balanced curriculum including English, maths and science. They must also teach relationships and sex education, and religious education.” The practical outcome is the same either way — pupils study RE — but the legal route to it is not.

The parental right to withdraw a child from religious education sits on a third, narrower footing again. Section 71 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 gives that right to the parent of “a pupil at a community, foundation or voluntary school” — the maintained-school categories, not academies. Strictly by the statute’s own wording, none of Cambridge’s eight schools is a community, foundation or voluntary school, so the withdrawal right that applies to them in practice comes from their own funding agreement rather than from section 71 itself. Maintained special schools sit outside section 80(1)(a) entirely, under a separate regulation-making power in section 71(7) of the same 1998 Act — one reason Castle School, Cambridge’s state-funded special school, is treated separately from the eight mainstream secondaries throughout this page.

Which Exam Board Sets GCSE Religious Studies, and What Are the Codes?

Two of the four boards that offer GCSE Religious Studies in England publish two separate specifications each, not one. AQA’s Specification A carries the code 8062 and Specification B carries 8063, both confirmed on AQA’s own specification PDFs, both dated “Version 1.3, 1 September 2025”. Pearson Edexcel likewise offers Religious Studies A (1RA0) and Religious Studies B (1RB0), confirmed inside Pearson’s own hosted specification PDFs. OCR and Eduqas each publish one main route, coded J625 and C120QS respectively.

None of these codes came from memory or from a raw HTML regex match — each was read either from the board’s own qualification page or, for AQA, Pearson and OCR, from inside the specification PDF itself, where AQA and OCR both call their accreditation number a QAN and OCR’s own text also labels it “QN” in the same sentence, while Pearson calls the equivalent figure a “QN” throughout. Eduqas’s own reference-codes panel lists a single Ofqual number, 601/8879/0, beneath both C120QS and the Short Course C125QT without separating which code it belongs to — genuinely ambiguous on the board’s own page, so it is marked “see note” here rather than assigned to one route. Neither AQA nor Pearson Edexcel shows a live, separately coded Short Course in its current specification documents, despite AQA’s own marketing text describing its Specification A as “co-teachable with our GCSE Religious Studies Short Course” — a real product name with no locatable code as of 2 September 2026, so no code is published for it here. Confirming whether that AQA Short Course still exists as a live, separately accredited qualification was beyond what this page could verify at source.

How Many Cambridge Pupils Actually Sit GCSE Religious Studies?

Department for Education school performance data publishes each Cambridge secondary’s own subject entry numbers for 2024/25 — the actual count of pupils entered, not a rate. Every figure below was fetched directly from that school’s own “Subjects entered” page, with the school’s URN confirmed present in the page body:

The range runs from 173 pupils at St Bede’s Inter-Church School — 96.1% of its own cohort — down to zero at two schools. Summed across all eight, that is 253 Religious Studies entries out of 1,104 pupils citywide, 22.9%, but that single citywide figure hides a spread far wider than any national or county average would suggest: one school enters virtually everybody, two enter nobody, and the rest sit somewhere between 4.5% and 23.0%. None of the eight schools’ own subjects-entered pages lists a separate “Religious Studies (Short Course)” row for 2024/25 — every entry recorded is the full course, labelled on the page exactly as “Religious Studies | GCSE”. At Coleridge and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology, the missing row is a genuine zero rather than a small number suppressed for size: both schools’ own tables show other subjects with single-figure entries (Arabic GCSE, for instance) in full, so a true zero-entry subject is simply absent from the table rather than shown as “0”.

Why Does Religious Character Track Entry More Than Anything Else?

GIAS lists St Bede’s Inter-Church School’s religious character as “Church of England/Roman Catholic” — a joint Anglican-Catholic designation, confirmed directly against its URN, 137924, and an unusual one: most schools with a religious character are one or the other, not both. It is also the only one of Cambridge’s eight state secondaries with any recorded religious character at all. GIAS records the other seven as having none, in slightly different wording depending on the school’s own data entry: “None” for Parkside, Coleridge and Trumpington, “Does not apply” for Netherhall, Chesterton, North Cambridge Academy and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology.

St Bede’s 96.1% Religious Studies entry rate is not just the highest in the city, it is in a different category entirely from every other school — more than four times the next-highest figure, The Netherhall School’s 23.0%. But the pattern is not a clean rule that only faith schools enter pupils for the subject: Netherhall itself has no recorded religious character and still enters the second-highest share, well ahead of Parkside, Chesterton, North Cambridge Academy and Trumpington, all also without a religious character. Religious character is the strongest single differentiator visible in this data — it marks the one school that treats Religious Studies as close to compulsory for its own pupils — but it does not explain the ordering among the seven schools without one.

Does a High EBacc Entry Rate Squeeze Out GCSE Religious Studies?

Religious Studies is not an EBacc subject, so in principle it should not compete with a school’s EBacc entries for the same curriculum slot the way History and Geography compete with each other. Gov.uk’s own EBacc guidance lists the humanities component as “geography or history” only, with no mention of religious studies anywhere among its five components. But a school with a very high EBacc entry rate has, by definition, filled more of its pupils’ option blocks with EBacc subjects, leaving fewer slots free for a non-EBacc subject like Religious Studies — so it is worth checking whether that squeeze shows up in Cambridge’s own figures.

It does not, at least not in one consistent direction. Across the same eight schools, the proportion entering the full EBacc (English, maths, science, a humanity and a language together) for 2024/25 ranges from 1.9% at Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology up to 85.9% at Parkside Community College. Coleridge Community College enters 72.7% of its cohort for the full EBacc — the second-highest rate in the city — yet zero pupils for Religious Studies. St Bede’s Inter-Church School enters a broadly similar share for the full EBacc, 71.1%, and by far the highest share for Religious Studies, 96.1%. Two schools with almost identical EBacc entry rates sit at opposite ends of the Religious Studies table. On these eight schools, whatever else shapes how a school fills its optional curriculum blocks, a high EBacc entry rate on its own does not reliably squeeze out Religious Studies — religious character, discussed above, tracks the spread far more closely than EBacc pressure does.

What Does St Bede’s Own Curriculum Map Reveal About Its Exam Board?

St Bede’s does not call its Religious Studies department “Religious Studies” on its own website — its subject listing names the department “Theology”, fitting for a dual Church of England/Roman Catholic school. The school publishes its own Theology Curriculum Map as a PDF, and that document, read directly rather than inferred from a marketing page, is specific enough to check against the exam boards’ own specifications.

Its Year 10 and Year 11 columns name units called “Relationships and families”, “The Existence of God” and “Religion, peace and conflict”. AQA’s own GCSE Religious Studies A specification lists six Religious, Philosophical and Ethical Studies themes by name, and three of them match St Bede’s own unit titles word for word: Theme A, “Relationships and families”; Theme C, “The existence of God and revelation”; and Theme D, “Religion, peace and conflict”. The school’s Year 9-11 columns also cover Christianity and Judaism as named religions in depth, matching AQA Specification A’s Component 1 structure, which requires two religions studied from a list of six.

This is strong textual evidence read from the school’s own published curriculum document, not an explicit statement from St Bede’s that it uses AQA, and it should be treated that way: an indicator worth knowing before a first tutoring session, not a confirmed fact to state as certain. No other Cambridge school’s own website yielded an equivalent document specific enough to check against a named specification’s own theme titles in the time this page could spend verifying it.

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What This Means for Choosing GCSE Religious Studies Support in Cambridge

The entries-based picture above changes what sensible Religious Studies support looks like, and it depends heavily on which of Cambridge’s eight schools a child attends. At St Bede’s Inter-Church School, a Religious Studies pupil is one of well over a hundred classmates on the same course, in a school where the subject carries real institutional weight and curriculum time; cohort-wide mock and past-paper resources are likely to exist for whichever specification the school has chosen, and the school’s own curriculum map points toward AQA Specification A specifically. At The Netherhall School, a pupil is part of a smaller but still substantial group of 41. At the five schools entering fewer than twenty pupils each, and especially at the two entering none, a family considering the subject is working against the school’s own curriculum weighting, not with it.

We have not independently verified which exam board or route each of the seven schools other than St Bede’s has chosen for Religious Studies, nor which specific religions or themes each has selected within its specification; Department for Education entry data does not publish either, and confirming both for every school individually was beyond what this page could verify at source. A family should treat any specific board or theme claim for their own child’s school as a question for the school directly. What the data above does support directly is the entries picture itself: which schools have built Religious Studies into a large, well-resourced cohort, which offer it as a minority option, and which do not enter pupils for it as a GCSE at all — regardless of whether they still teach it, as the law requires every one of them to in some form.

Cambridge’s Eight State Secondaries in the Wider County

Cambridge itself is not a separate local authority for education purposes; every one of its eight state secondaries files its Department for Education data under Cambridgeshire County Council, the same authority that also covers a much larger area beyond the city boundary. The same Department for Education pages used above also publish Cambridgeshire’s county-wide Key Stage 4 cohort: 6,836 pupils in 2024/25. Cambridge’s own eight state secondaries — 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 — together account for 1,104 of those 6,836 pupils, 16.1% of the county’s entire Year 11 cohort; the remaining 84% sit in schools spread across the rest of Cambridgeshire, in towns such as Ely, Huntingdon and Wisbech that are not part of the city itself.

Castle School, Cambridge, sits inside the city itself but is a state-funded special school rather than a mainstream secondary — confirmed directly at GIAS against its URN, 134972 — so it falls outside the eight-school comparison on this page. Maintained special schools are also treated separately in the religious education law itself: section 80(2)(b) of the Education Act 2002 excludes them from the general section 80(1)(a) duty, with their own religious education provision instead governed by regulations made under section 71(7) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998.

Leading Tuition builds a GCSE Religious Studies programme around a child’s own school, board and cohort, rather than assuming every Cambridge pupil sits the same course in the same numbers. Our GCSE tuition service covers the full range of GCSE subjects a Cambridge pupil might combine with Religious Studies, and our History tuition page sets out what support looks like for the humanity that competes for the same optional block at many of these schools. If your child is also weighing up other GCSE subjects, our GCSE History tutors in Cambridge, GCSE English tutors in Cambridge and GCSE maths tutors in Cambridge pages cover those subjects in their own right. Our guide to 16+ tuition in Cambridge covers what comes after GCSE, and our guide to tutoring across Cambridge covers the city as a whole.

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