GCSE Tuition in Kingston upon Thames 2026

Leading Tuition provides GCSE tuition in Kingston upon Thames, a London borough where state-funded schools posted a 69.3% grade 5+ English & maths rate in the 2025 GCSE results — the highest of any local authority in England that year — and an Attainment 8 score of 59.2, just 0.1 points off the national maximum. This page sets out what those figures mean school by school, and how our tutors work with Kingston upon Thames GCSE students.

How Do Kingston upon Thames's GCSE Results Compare With England?

Kingston upon Thames's 2025 results, covering the 2024/25 academic year and based on grades announced on 21 August 2025, place the borough at or near the top of every headline measure the Department for Education publishes for local authorities in England. The table below sets Kingston upon Thames's figures against England's state-funded schools, England's schools overall, and the highest-scoring English regions on each measure in 2025.

DfE's own local-authority range table states the national maximum and minimum for each measure directly: the grade 5+ English & maths rate ran from 24.7% in Knowsley to 69.3% in Kingston upon Thames, and the EBacc Average Point Score ran from 2.89 in Knowsley to 5.52 in Kingston upon Thames — Kingston upon Thames is the named maximum on both. On Attainment 8, the same table names Sutton's 59.3 as the national maximum, with Kingston upon Thames's own 59.2 just 0.1 points behind; DfE's range table gives only the minimum and maximum local authority for each measure, not a full ranking, so the honest claim is that Kingston upon Thames sits 0.1 points off the national maximum, not that it is confirmed second nationally. Even measured against England's best-performing region rather than a single borough, Kingston upon Thames still leads: Outer London recorded the highest regional grade 5+ rate, at 53.8%, and the highest regional Attainment 8 score, at 50.8 — both below Kingston upon Thames's own local-authority figures of 69.3% and 59.2. Inner London posted the highest regional EBacc entry rate, at 57.1%, ahead of Kingston upon Thames's 65.6% only as a region-versus-borough comparison; nationally, 2025's EBacc entry rate of 40.5% was itself the highest since the measure was introduced in 2010.

One measure is missing from that table by design. Progress 8 — which measures how much progress pupils make between key stage 2 and their GCSEs, judged against pupils nationally who started from a similar point — cannot be published for 2025. The Department for Education states this directly: “It is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26. This is because there is no KS2 prior attainment data available to use to calculate Progress 8 when the relevant cohorts reach the end of KS4 as primary tests and assessments were cancelled in academic years 2019/20 and 2020/21 due to COVID-19 disruption.” The last year a Progress 8 score could be calculated was 2024, a full year behind the Attainment 8 and grade 5+ figures above. Kingston upon Thames's 2024 Progress 8 score was 0.65, well above an England state-funded average of -0.03 the same year; the section below sets out how that borough-wide figure breaks down by named school, and why it is not simply a rerun of the Attainment 8 ranking above.

GCSE Performance Across Kingston upon Thames's Secondary Schools

Kingston upon Thames's borough-wide figures are an average across 23 secondary schools and colleges of every type, maintained, academy and independent. The decision a family is usually weighing is about one specific school, so the table below sets out named, DfE-published 2025 figures for the thirteen Kingston upon Thames secondaries with results substantial enough to publish. Schools are ordered by their 2025 Attainment 8 score.

*Kingston Grammar School and Surbiton High School are independent schools that teach some or all of their core GCSE subjects as International GCSEs (IGCSEs), which DfE's grade 5+ and EBacc entry measures do not count — the 0.0% figures above are a gap in what DfE's dataset covers, not a measure of how either school's pupils actually perform. The next section explains the mechanism in full, in each school's own published words.

For comparison, Kingston upon Thames's own borough-wide average was 59.2 for Attainment 8 (2025) and 69.3% for grade 5+ English & maths (2025). Two of the schools above, Tiffin School and The Tiffin Girls' School, are selective grammar schools; their entrance tests, catchment areas and admissions dates are covered in full on our Kingston upon Thames tutoring overview and are not repeated here, which is about GCSE results and tuition rather than entry at 11+.

Why Do Kingston Grammar School and Surbiton High School Show 0% on DfE's Headline GCSE Measures?

Both schools publish a respectable DfE Attainment 8 score — 43.5 for Kingston Grammar School, 42.1 for Surbiton High School — alongside 0.0% on the grade 5+ English & maths measure and 0.0% on EBacc entry. That combination only makes sense once the qualifications behind each figure are known. Attainment 8 counts any qualification on DfE's approved list, including most GCSEs a school chooses to enter; the grade 5+ and EBacc measures are stricter, and specifically exclude International GCSEs (IGCSEs), which several independent schools use for some core subjects because they consider them a more rigorous preparation for A-level study.

Kingston Grammar School's own GCSE curriculum page states: “In common with many leading independent schools, we offer a combination of GCSE and International GCSE (IGCSE) qualifications,” and publishes the full subject-by-subject split behind that sentence: 12 subjects are listed as IGCSE and 8 as GCSE. Every subject the school marks as a “Core subject” — English Language, English Literature, Mathematics, Biology and Chemistry — is an IGCSE, and so is Physics, which the same table groups with Biology and Chemistry as a Triple or Double Award rather than carrying that label itself. Of the school's four modern languages, French, German and Spanish are IGCSE and Italian is GCSE; one language is compulsory, so that core slot is IGCSE for a pupil taking French, German or Spanish, but a standard GCSE for a pupil taking Italian instead. Seven of the GCSE subjects on the page — Art, Computer Science, Design Technology, Drama, Geography, Latin and Religion and Philosophy — are listed as optional subjects; Italian sits inside the same modern-language block as French, German and Spanish, which the table states may be taken as the compulsory core language or as an optional subject. Whichever language a pupil studies, English Language, English Literature and Mathematics being IGCSE is enough on its own to keep Kingston Grammar School off DfE's approved list for the grade 5+ English & maths measure, and the EBacc entry measure requires all five pillars including English and Maths, so no pupil there can register a pass on either measure however well they actually perform, which is why both figures read 0.0% rather than a low but non-zero number.

Surbiton High School's own published explanation, dated 8 February 2018 and still live on the school's site, describes the same mechanism for a narrower set of subjects: “IGCSEs have been carefully selected for Maths and Modern Foreign Languages as they offer a more rigorous course and provide superior preparation for A-level study,” and adds plainly that “what is crucially missing from the analysis is that it does not take account of any results for our Maths, Spanish, German and French IGCSEs; Government data measures now exclude these.” That 2018 source names only Maths and the three modern languages as IGCSE; it does not say what Surbiton High School teaches English as, and this page does not infer beyond what the school states. Maths being IGCSE is sufficient on its own to explain the school's 0.0% grade 5+ figure, because that measure requires both English and Maths to be on DfE's approved list, and Surbiton High School's Maths is not.

What the published sources do not settle is why each school's Attainment 8 score — 43.5 for Kingston Grammar School, 42.1 for Surbiton High School — lands where it does rather than near zero. Attainment 8 draws on whichever of a pupil's qualifications are both taken and on DfE's approved list, and neither school publishes which combination of optional subjects each pupil actually sits, so this page does not reconstruct that arithmetic. What is established directly from each school's own published curriculum is narrower and just as important: the core subjects named above sit outside DfE's approved list for these two measures, so neither the grade 5+ figure nor the EBacc entry figure reflects how Kingston Grammar School's or Surbiton High School's pupils actually perform in English, Maths, the sciences or languages. Both schools also show “NP” — not published — against Progress 8 for 2024, a separate gap in the same dataset that the next section addresses directly.

Which Kingston School Makes the Most GCSE Progress?

Attainment 8 describes the grades pupils leave school with; Progress 8 describes how far they travelled to get there, by comparing each pupil's results against other pupils nationally who started key stage 4 from a similar point. A school can rank highly on one measure and differently on the other, and Kingston upon Thames's own schools show exactly that pattern. As explained above, DfE could not calculate a 2025 Progress 8 score for any school; the figures below are from 2024, the last year DfE was able to calculate one, and every Progress 8 number on this page is labelled with that year for that reason.

The Kingston Academy, a non-selective comprehensive with a 2025 Attainment 8 score of 62.8, recorded the borough's highest 2024 Progress 8 score, at 1.16, described by DfE as well above average — ahead of both Tiffin schools the same year, including The Tiffin Girls' School at 1.06 and Tiffin School at 0.86. That is not a claim that The Kingston Academy's pupils out-attained Tiffin's: The Tiffin Girls' School's 2025 Attainment 8 score of 85.3 and Tiffin School's 79.1 remain among the highest recorded anywhere in England, comfortably ahead of The Kingston Academy's 62.8. Progress 8 is structurally harder to score highly on from a very high starting point: a selective intake admitted close to the highest marks available already sits near the ceiling of what the measure can register as progress, while a comprehensive intake with a wider spread of starting points has correspondingly more room to show measured gains. Both patterns can be true for the same schools in the same year — the highest raw attainment and the smallest measured headroom for further gains.

Kingston Grammar School and Surbiton High School show “NP” for 2024 Progress 8, the same publication gap explained above for their grade 5+ and EBacc figures: DfE cannot calculate a Progress 8 score without a full set of approved-qualification results to compare against national outcomes, and IGCSE results in core subjects do not supply that. Kingston upon Thames's own borough-wide 2024 Progress 8 score was 0.65, well above the England state-funded average of -0.03 the same year.

GCSE Subjects We Tutor for Kingston upon Thames Families

Kingston upon Thames's EBacc entry rate — the percentage of pupils sitting the full combination of English, maths, a science, a language and history or geography — was 65.6% in the 2025 results, well above the England state-funded average of 40.5% and above even Outer London's regional average. That entry pattern shapes what Kingston upon Thames families most often ask us to cover, and our subject coverage follows it directly: Maths and English Language and English Literature, the double-weighted Attainment 8 components; Biology, Chemistry and Physics, whether a student is sitting combined or separate science; History and Geography, the EBacc's humanities pillar; and GCSE or IGCSE languages including French, Spanish and German.

Whichever specification a Kingston upon Thames student's school uses — AQA, Edexcel, OCR or WJEC/Eduqas GCSE at one of the borough's state-funded schools, or Cambridge or Edexcel International GCSE at Kingston Grammar School or Surbiton High School — our tutors confirm the exact board and specification before building a programme, because grade boundaries, paper structures and coursework requirements differ meaningfully between a reformed 9-1 GCSE and an IGCSE covering the same subject name. See our full GCSE tuition service for how a programme is structured across a full academic year.

How Does Leading Tuition Work With Kingston upon Thames GCSE Students?

Every Kingston upon Thames GCSE programme starts with a short diagnostic assessment against the student's own school and exact specification, not a generic GCSE checklist, so a tutor can see immediately whether the priority is closing a specific topic gap, building exam technique under timed conditions, or working ahead of a school's own scheme of work. Our tutors hold degrees from leading UK universities and are matched to a student by subject, specification and year group rather than by availability alone.

Sessions run one-to-one online, with a shared whiteboard that lets a tutor work through past-paper questions, mark answers against the real mark scheme, and share annotated resources in real time — the same working method whether a student attends one of Kingston upon Thames's selective grammar schools, one of its non-selective comprehensives, or one of its IGCSE-teaching independent schools. Progress is reviewed against the student's own target grades at agreed intervals, and session notes are shared with parents after each lesson so support at home lines up with what happened in the tutorial.

All figures above are drawn from the Department for Education's Compare School and College Performance service and its Key Stage 4 performance, 2024/25 release, checked on 23 August 2026. Kingston Grammar School's and Surbiton High School's own curriculum pages, also checked on 23 August 2026, are linked in the section above. Families researching Kingston upon Thames tutoring more broadly can also see our overview of tutoring across Kingston upon Thames.

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