Leicester's 2024/25 key-stage-4 entries for GCSE Business Studies, school by school - including the eight schools that enter nobody, and the two that run a vocational alternative instead.
Book a Free ConsultationLeicester City's 22 state-funded secondaries entered 837 pupils for GCSE Business Studies in 2024/25 - an 18.5% rate against the city's 4,523 key-stage-4 pupils - but eight of those 22 schools entered nobody at all. Our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester on whichever route their own school actually teaches.
Already know whether your child's school enters GCSE Business Studies or runs a vocational alternative instead? Our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real qualification and exam board.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppGCSE Business Studies is not part of the English Baccalaureate, and that single fact shapes everything else on this page. The Department for Education's own EBacc guidance defines the measure as five fixed pillars: English language and literature, maths, the sciences, geography or history, and a language. Business Studies appears in none of them. Nothing in the performance-measure structure pushes a school to timetable it, and nothing pushes a pupil towards it the way the EBacc pillars are pushed - it sits in the optional blocks, competing for space with every other non-EBacc GCSE and vocational qualification a school chooses to offer.
That makes the honest questions about Leicester's Business Studies provision different from the questions this site's EBacc-pillar subject pages ask. Rather than "how many pupils take the full EBacc combination," the useful questions are: does a given school enter anyone for the GCSE at all; if not, does it run a vocational business qualification instead, on a different DfE subject row entirely; and is there any real relationship between how hard a school pushes the EBacc and how much room is left over for Business Studies. This page answers all three, school by school, using the Department for Education's own 2024/25 data - not memory, not a marketplace tutor directory, and not a single quoted city-wide total taken on trust.
Whether your child's school treats Business Studies as a core option or barely offers it, our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real qualification and exam board.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppLeicester City is a unitary authority in its own right, entirely separate from Leicestershire, the surrounding county, and the Department for Education reports the two areas as distinct rows that should never be combined. Leicester City's own published key-stage-4 population for 2024/25 is 4,523 pupils; Leicestershire's is 7,862 - nearly double, and not a figure this page uses anywhere below.
DfE does not publish a single, easily quoted "GCSE Business Studies entries in Leicester" headline the way it does for some measures, so this page built the figure the same way its Leicester Computer Science page built its own: by individually checking every one of Leicester City's 22 state-funded secondaries recorded in DfE's 2024/25 subjects-entered data and summing their own GCSE Business Studies rows. Fourteen of those 22 schools entered at least one pupil; the total across all fourteen comes to 837. Set against the LA's own 4,523 KS4 population, that is an 18.5% rate - this page's own derivation, not a DfE-published percentage, shown here with every input school listed below so it can be checked. A further 39 entries come from four of Leicester's eight independent schools, sitting outside the state-funded count entirely; the city-wide total across all 30 secondaries this page checked, state-funded and independent combined, is 876.
The table below covers all fourteen Leicester City state-funded secondaries DfE records with a GCSE Business Studies entry in 2024/25, ranked by entry rate - the percentage of each school's own key-stage-4 cohort entered for the subject.
| School | GCSE Business Studies entries | Entry rate |
|---|---|---|
| Avanti Fields School | 120 | 65.2% |
| The City of Leicester College | 113 | 41.9% |
| Babington Academy | 105 | 38.9% |
| St Paul's Catholic School | 60 | 32.8% |
| English Martyrs' Catholic School | 61 | 32.3% |
| Moat Community College | 65 | 30.5% |
| Orchard Mead Academy | 68 | 30.4% |
| Lancaster Academy | 65 | 29.8% |
| Madani Boys School | 22 | 25.0% |
| Sir Jonathan North Girls' College | 57 | 23.8% |
| Madani Girls' School | 19 | 20.2% |
| Rushey Mead Academy | 54 | 16.8% |
| Beaumont Leys School | 27 | 13.0% |
| Tudor Grange Samworth Academy | 1 | 0.8% |
Avanti Fields School tops the table at 65.2%, two-thirds of its 184 pupils entered for the subject - the highest rate of any Leicester City state-funded secondary this page checked. The City of Leicester College enters the largest number outright, 113 out of 270, with Babington Academy close behind at 105. At the foot of the table, Tudor Grange Samworth Academy's single entry out of 123 pupils is a genuine, tiny, non-zero figure - not rounded down from a larger number, and not the same as the eight schools below that enter nobody at all. Among Leicester's independent schools, entries run smaller but proportionally can run higher still: Jameah Boys Academy enters 18 of its 21 pupils, 85.7%, and Jameah Academy enters 14 of 23, 60.9% - both small cohorts, worth reading as single-school figures rather than a citywide pattern.
Wherever your child's school sits in that table, our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real qualification and exam board.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppEight of Leicester City's 22 state-funded secondaries recorded in DfE's 2024/25 data show no GCSE Business Studies entries at all: Soar Valley College, Castle Mead Academy, Judgemeadow Community College and Crown Hills Community College - four ordinary mainstream academies with substantial cohorts - plus two special schools, Keyham Lodge School and Millgate School, where DfE's own performance measures do not apply in the same way. The remaining two, New College Leicester and Fullhurst Community College, are a different case again: both instead enter pupils for Small Business Management, a vocational Technical Award recorded under its own separate DfE subject heading, not a variant of the GCSE.
| School | GCSE Business Studies | Small Business Management (Technical Award) | KS4 pupils |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fullhurst Community College | 0 | 65 | 287 |
| New College Leicester | 0 | 65 | 205 |
Fullhurst Community College and New College Leicester each recorded exactly 65 Small Business Management entries in 2024/25 - a genuine coincidence between two different schools' own separate figures, not a rounded or shared number. New College Leicester's 2024/25 record is filed under a school that no longer operates under that name: this page independently checked the establishment record at the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools service and confirmed New College Leicester (URN 131945) closed on 30 April 2025, and that a new establishment, The Herewoode Academy (URN 151607, part of the Nova Education Trust), opened the very next day, 1 May 2025, at the same Glenfield Road address and under the same DfE number, 856/4005. The 2024/25 subject data above belongs to the closed predecessor school; it is not yet available for The Herewoode Academy under its own URN.
Soar Valley College is worth naming specifically because it is the largest school in this list by cohort - 309 pupils - and, on this site's separate Leicester Computer Science page, the school with the single highest number of GCSE Computer Science entries in the city, 105. The same school records zero for GCSE Business Studies and no Small Business Management entry either: a straightforward case of a large, otherwise subject-rich school simply not offering business as a qualification route at all in 2024/25, rather than any sign of suppressed or hidden data.
If your child's school is one that enters nobody for GCSE Business Studies, our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors can still help - many families choose to prepare independently. Get in touch to discuss your child's options.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppBecause Business Studies competes for space in a finite option block, a hypothesis worth testing - not a finding to assert - is that schools which push most of their cohort through the full EBacc combination leave less room for subjects like Business Studies, and schools with low EBacc entry leave more. This page tested that hypothesis directly against Leicester's own 20 mainstream state-funded secondaries with both figures published for 2024/25 (the city's two special schools, Keyham Lodge School and Millgate School, are excluded - DfE's EBacc measures do not apply to them in the same way).
Correlating each school's own 2024/25-measure EBacc entry rate against its own Business Studies entry rate produces a Pearson correlation coefficient of r = +0.07 across all 20 schools - close enough to zero to call flat, and the opposite sign from what a squeeze would predict. Splitting the same 20 schools into a low-EBacc half and a high-EBacc half and pooling each half's own entries and pupils gives a similar picture: 17.8% for the low-EBacc half against 20.6% for the high-EBacc half, a small gap in the opposite direction from a squeeze. Removing Avanti Fields School - the single school highest on both measures at once, 88.6% EBacc and 65.2% Business Studies - flips the correlation to r = -0.19 across the remaining 19 schools, which shows how easily one school's own curriculum choices can move the sign of a result built from only 20 data points.
| Test (Leicester's own 20 mainstream state-funded secondaries, 2024/25) | Result |
|---|---|
| Pearson r, EBacc entry rate vs Business Studies entry rate, all 20 schools | +0.07 (no meaningful relationship) |
| Pearson r, excluding Avanti Fields School (highest EBacc and highest Business Studies rate) | -0.19 (sign reverses) |
| Pooled Business Studies rate, low-EBacc half of schools (7.6%-30.6% EBacc entry) | 17.8% |
| Pooled Business Studies rate, high-EBacc half of schools (31.7%-89.6% EBacc entry) | 20.6% |
This page cannot choose between two different explanations for a result this close to zero. One is that EBacc entry and Business Studies entry are genuinely independent choices at Leicester's schools. The other is a confound this page's data cannot rule out: schools with a stronger overall entry culture tend to enter pupils for more subjects across the board, EBacc and non-EBacc alike, which would push a school's numbers up on both measures at once regardless of any real trade-off between them - Avanti Fields School, high on both counts, is consistent with either story. Leicester's own 2024/25 figures do not support asserting a squeeze, and this page does not offer a mechanism it cannot support with its own data.
Whatever your child's school prioritises in its option blocks, our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real qualification and exam board.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppThe 2024/25 figures throughout this page are current published data, but the measure they sit alongside is being retired. 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 EBacc entry-rate figures used in the comparison above are the 2024/25 measure - accurate as published, but not a measure this page treats as continuing unchanged, and not one to describe as "the current measure" once the 2025/26 figures are published.
The same document sets out what replaces the current Progress 8 and Attainment 8 structure: two dedicated slots for English and maths, two for science, and four further "breadth" slots, of which at least two must come from humanities, creative subjects or languages. The remaining breadth slots, in the government's own words, "can be filled by any qualification eligible for inclusion in key stage 4 performance measures" - a category GCSE Business Studies falls into. In practice, that means Business Studies will keep competing for space in a finite set of slots after the reform, much as it does in Leicester's option blocks today, rather than gaining or losing a dedicated place of its own. This is a stated future model, not yet in effect for the 2024/25 figures on this page, and this page does not treat it as changing anything about the entries above.
Four boards currently offer GCSE Business Studies in England, each independently confirmed on its own specification document or qualification page this session - not carried over from the national Business Studies page's own AQA-and-Edexcel comparison, which does not cover OCR or Eduqas codes. AQA's GCSE Business carries the code 8132, first teaching from September 2017, on a single specification version (1.0, dated August 2016) with no second live edition - unlike this site's Leicester Computer Science page, which found AQA running two live editions of a different GCSE under one code. AQA's own specification confirms assessment through two written papers, Paper 1 (Influences of operations and HRM on business activity) and Paper 2 (Influences of marketing and finance on business activity), each 1 hour 45 minutes, 90 marks, 50% of the GCSE - 180 marks in total, with no coursework or non-exam assessment on either paper.
Pearson Edexcel's GCSE (9-1) in Business carries the code 1BS0, Qualification Number 603/0121/1, also first teaching from September 2017, and is now on Issue 2 of its specification, confirmed on the document's own summary-of-changes page. OCR's GCSE (9-1) Business carries the code J204, Qualification Number 603/0295/1, confirmed in the page's own heading text on OCR's qualification page - a genuinely live, current specification, not a superseded one still resolving with a 200 response. WJEC Eduqas's GCSE (9-1) in Business carries the reference code C510QS, Qualification Number 603/0305/0, teaching from September 2017, confirmed on Eduqas's own qualification page after its main "/qualifications/business/" listing redirected there. None of the four is withdrawn, and none currently runs two live parallel editions of its Business specification - a genuinely different situation from GCSE Computer Science, where AQA's 8525 code covers both a "Current" and an "Updated" edition. Unlike Computer Science, the Department for Education's November 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review response names no plan to reform or replace the GCSE Business Studies qualification itself.
Confirming your child's exact exam board and specification matters more than the code alone, our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around AQA, Edexcel, OCR or Eduqas, whichever their own school teaches.
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Ready to see which route your child's own school actually follows? Our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real qualification and exam board.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppWhether a Leicester pupil attends Avanti Fields School, where 65.2% of the cohort sits GCSE Business Studies, or one of the eight schools that enter nobody at all, the starting point is the same: confirming which qualification, exam board and paper structure actually applies at that pupil's own school, rather than assuming from a citywide average. Our diagnostic assessment for every new Leicester Business Studies student begins there, then builds a programme from a pupil's own topic-by-topic gaps in business concepts, case-study technique and the numerical and financial analysis skills every specification requires.
Our tutors hold degrees from leading UK universities and work one-to-one online through past-paper questions marked against the real mark scheme for a student's own specification - AQA, Edexcel, OCR or Eduqas - covering both examined papers in full, whichever board a pupil's own school has chosen. For exam structure, paper breakdown and grade-boundary detail that applies nationally rather than city by city, see our national Business Studies tutoring service, which covers the AQA-versus-Edexcel paper comparison and the A-Level pre-release case study in full. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades, and Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews.
For related subjects and levels, see our national Business Studies tutoring service, our wider GCSE tuition across every subject, and our other Leicester subject pages for GCSE Computer Science, GCSE Maths and A-Level Biology. For the full picture of tutoring across the city, see our overview of Leicester tutoring, or browse our full directory of UK tutoring locations.
No. The Department for Education's own EBacc guidance defines the English Baccalaureate as five fixed pillars: English language and literature, maths, the sciences, geography or history, and a language. GCSE Business Studies is not one of them, and there is no route by which it counts towards a pupil's EBacc combination. That makes it a genuinely optional subject that competes for space in a school's option blocks alongside every other non-EBacc GCSE and vocational qualification on offer, rather than a subject any pupil is steered towards by the performance-measure structure itself.
This page individually checked all 22 Leicester City state-funded secondaries recorded in the Department for Education's 2024/25 subjects-entered data and found 837 GCSE Business Studies entries between them, against the local authority's own published total of 4,523 pupils at the end of key stage 4 - an 18.5% rate. That 837 figure is this page's own school-by-school sum, not a single quoted DfE total, and it excludes 39 further entries from Leicester's independent schools, which sit outside the state-funded count.
Among Leicester City's state-funded secondaries that enter any pupils, Avanti Fields School records the highest rate, 65.2%, from 120 entries out of 184 pupils. Tudor Grange Samworth Academy records the lowest non-zero rate: a single entry out of 123 pupils, 0.8%. Eight of the city's 22 state-funded secondaries enter nobody at all, which this page treats as a separate, genuine zero rather than the bottom of the ranking - covered in full below.
Eight of Leicester City's 22 state-funded secondaries recorded in DfE's 2024/25 data show no GCSE Business Studies entries: Soar Valley College, Castle Mead Academy, Judgemeadow Community College, Crown Hills Community College, two special schools (Keyham Lodge School and Millgate School), and two schools - New College Leicester and Fullhurst Community College - that instead entered pupils for Small Business Management, a vocational Technical Award recorded under its own separate DfE subject heading. A zero in the GCSE Business Studies column is not proof a school ignores business as a subject area.
Still working out which route applies to your child? Our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real qualification and exam board.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppNot in a way this page can call reliable. Correlating each of Leicester's 20 mainstream state-funded secondaries' own 2024/25 EBacc entry rate against its own Business Studies entry rate gives a Pearson r of +0.07 - essentially flat - which drops to -0.19 if Avanti Fields School, the single school highest on both measures, is excluded. A low-EBacc half of these schools pools to a 17.8% Business Studies rate against 20.6% for the high-EBacc half - a small gap in the opposite direction from a squeeze. This page cannot separate that from a confound it cannot rule out: schools with a stronger overall entry culture may simply enter more subjects across the board, EBacc and non-EBacc alike.
No. Leicester City is a unitary authority in its own right, entirely separate from Leicestershire, the surrounding county, and the Department for Education reports the two areas separately, with their own key-stage-4 pupil populations (4,523 for Leicester City against 7,862 for Leicestershire in 2024/25). This page's 837-entry, 18.5% GCSE Business Studies figure is specific to Leicester City's own state-funded secondaries; it says nothing about any school in Leicestershire, and a source that treats 'Leicester' as covering the whole county is combining two different local authorities' data.
The Department for Education's own school-level subjects-entered data lists the academic GCSE under the subject heading 'Business Studies:Single', with the qualification column reading 'GCSE'. Two Leicester schools that show no entry under that heading - New College Leicester and Fullhurst Community College - instead show entries under a separate heading, 'Small Business Management', with the qualification column reading 'Technical Award': a vocational qualification on its own grading scale, which does not count towards the EBacc and is recorded on a different row of DfE's own data, not as a variant of the GCSE.
Four boards currently offer GCSE Business Studies in England, each confirmed directly on its own specification. AQA's GCSE Business carries the code 8132, first teaching from September 2017, assessed through two written papers worth 90 marks each (180 total), confirmed in AQA's own specification PDF. Pearson Edexcel's GCSE (9-1) in Business carries the code 1BS0, Qualification Number 603/0121/1, also first teaching from September 2017, now on Issue 2 of its specification. OCR's GCSE (9-1) Business carries the code J204, Qualification Number 603/0295/1, confirmed on OCR's own qualification page. WJEC Eduqas's GCSE (9-1) in Business carries the reference code C510QS, Qualification Number 603/0305/0, teaching from September 2017. Which board a Leicester pupil sits depends entirely on their own school's choice.
Our specialist GCSE Business Studies tutors start by confirming which qualification, exam board and paper structure a Leicester pupil's own school actually teaches - AQA, Edexcel, OCR or Eduqas GCSE Business, or the Small Business Management vocational alternative some schools run instead - rather than assuming from a citywide average. From there, our tutors build a one-to-one programme around a student's own topic-by-topic gaps in business concepts, case-study technique and numerical analysis, working through past-paper questions marked against the real mark scheme for their specification. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades, and Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews.
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Leading Tuition is rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. See also our overview of tutoring across Leicester and our Business Studies tutoring service.
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