GCSE Maths Tutors in Leicester: Leicester's 2025 DfE Results

Leicester, in Department for Education GCSE data, is the city unitary authority — a separate local authority from the surrounding county of Leicestershire. Its schools recorded an Attainment 8 maths score of 8.9 in 2025, against an England state-funded average of 9.1, and 43.2% of pupils achieved grade 5 or above in English and maths combined, against 45.4% nationally.

Why Does Leicester's 56% EAL Rate Matter for Reading These GCSE Maths Figures?

Any parent researching GCSE maths results across the East Midlands needs to know that Leicester and Leicestershire are two separate entries in the Department for Education's own school performance tables. Leicester is the city unitary authority — a compact urban area whose state-funded secondary schools returned a Key Stage 4 cohort of 4,523 pupils in 2025. Leicestershire is the surrounding county, administered as its own local authority, with its own secondary schools and its own separately reported GCSE outcomes. Every figure on this page describes Leicester, the city; none of it should be read as describing Leicestershire, or blended with it.

The distinction is not just administrative. Leicester serves a markedly different pupil population from the national average it is measured against. According to Ofsted's own local-area data, 56% of pupils in Leicester have English as an additional language, against a national rate of 22%, and 72% are recorded as being from a minority ethnic background, against 33% nationally. That is context for reading the results below, not an excuse for them: a city where a majority of pupils are acquiring academic English and maths content in a language many still speak as a second language at home sits in a different starting position from the national figures it is measured against.

The figures that follow are Leicester's own, set out local-authority-wide and then school by school, against England's state-funded average.

Why Does Leicester Trail England by 2.2 Points on Grade 5+ English and Maths?

Leicester's state-funded secondary schools submitted results for a Key Stage 4 cohort of 4,523 pupils in 2025, published by the Department for Education in April 2026. The table below sets out the headline measures against England's state-funded average.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School Performance service, 2025 secondary results (published April 2026), Leicester local authority.

Attainment 8 measures a pupil's best eight GCSE results, with English and maths each double-weighted, then averages that score across every pupil in the cohort. The maths component shown separately above is not a raw grade average — it is the average points score pupils achieve specifically in maths, on the same 1-to-9 point scale used for every other subject in the measure, which is why the England figure is small (9.1) rather than looking like a percentage. A maths component close to 9 or above generally means most of the cohort is clustered around a grade 4 to grade 6 outcome; Leicester's 8.9 sits just under that England benchmark, consistent with the grade 4 and grade 5 threshold percentages in the same table.

These attainment figures do not tell the whole story. Progress 8 — the Department for Education's measure of how much progress pupils make between primary school and their GCSEs, relative to pupils nationally with the same starting point — cannot currently be calculated for any local authority, Leicester included: the Department states plainly that "we are not able to calculate Progress 8 scores for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26", because, in the Department's own words, "there is no KS2 assessment data available to calculate the baseline for Progress 8 for these years due to Covid-19 disruption." Attainment 8 and its maths component are therefore the only current-year measures available, and Leicester sits below the England average on both of them.

Two further Leicester-only figures worth knowing: the city's EBacc entry rate — the proportion of pupils entered for the English Baccalaureate combination of GCSEs, including maths — was 40.2% in 2025, with an average EBacc point score of 4.02. And of the 2023 Key Stage 4 leavers tracked into the following year, 89% — 3,857 of 4,326 pupils — were in sustained education, employment or an apprenticeship.

What Separates City of Leicester College's 52.2% Grade 5 Rate From Babington Academy's 30.7%?

The local authority average is built from every state-funded secondary school in Leicester, and individual schools sit well above and well below it. Three named examples, all with 2025 results published by the Department for Education, show the range.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School Performance service, 2025 secondary results (published April 2026).

City of Leicester College and Soar Valley College both post an Attainment 8 maths component of 10, clear of both the Leicester and England averages, and both send a majority of their pupils to a grade 5 or above in English and maths combined. Babington Academy's maths component of 7.7 and its 30.7% reaching grade 5 or above in English and maths sit below the Leicester local authority average on every measure in this table. A parent comparing GCSE maths tutoring options in Leicester is weighing a genuinely wide range of school starting points, not a single citywide picture.

None of this means a school with a lower maths component is a poor choice for an individual family, or that a school with a higher one guarantees a strong outcome for every pupil within it — these are cohort averages, not predictions for any one child. What the spread does mean is that a Leicester parent cannot treat "the city average" as a proxy for their own child's school. A pupil at Babington Academy starting from a maths component of 7.7 is working from a different baseline than a pupil at City of Leicester College or Soar Valley College starting from 10, and any tutoring plan worth having should be built around the school the child actually attends, not the citywide figure.

Why Does City of Leicester College Require Grade 4 in Maths When Only 43.2% of Leicester Pupils Reach Grade 5?

Requirements differ by provider, but City of Leicester College's own published entry criteria for 2026 sixth-form entry set out that "for all Level 3 pathways five passes (9-4) or more at GCSE's are required including at least Grade 4 in Maths and English." Grade 4 is the national "standard pass" threshold; 62.8% of Leicester pupils reached it in 2025, against 64.8% nationally. Grade 5, the "strong pass" used in national league tables, was reached by 43.2% of Leicester pupils in 2025, against 45.4% nationally — meaning a meaningful share of Leicester pupils clear the standard pass in maths without reaching the higher strong-pass threshold. Some sixth forms and individual A-Level subjects, particularly further maths, the sciences and economics, ask for grade 5 or above in maths specifically, so the right target depends on the course and provider a student has in mind.

It is also worth separating the standard-pass and strong-pass thresholds from a resit requirement. Pupils in England who do not reach a grade 4 in GCSE maths are generally required to continue studying towards it alongside whatever course they move on to, until they either pass or leave education. Since 62.8% of Leicester's 2025 cohort reached a grade 4 in English and maths combined, the remainder did not — meaning a meaningful number of Leicester pupils each year are starting their sixth form, college or apprenticeship while still working towards that resit requirement in parallel — which is a different starting point again from a pupil already clear of it and deciding whether to push on to a grade 5.

How Leading Tuition Targets Leicester's 62.8%-to-43.2% Grade Gap in GCSE Maths

Leading Tuition works with GCSE maths students across Leicester at both Foundation and Higher tier, building a programme around each student's own school, exam board and target grade rather than a generic scheme. For a family weighing whether a grade 4 or a grade 5 is the realistic and useful target — see above — our tutors start from a diagnostic assessment against the student's current school data, then build towards whichever threshold actually matters for the sixth form or course the student has in mind.

A typical programme begins with a short diagnostic covering the topics most commonly tested at the student's tier — Foundation or Higher — to identify which topic areas are costing the most marks, since GCSE maths grade boundaries reward accuracy across a broad topic spread rather than depth in only one or two areas. From there, tutors build a topic-by-topic revision sequence timed against the student's own school's mock exam and results-day calendar, with periodic timed past-paper practice under exam conditions once the foundational topics are secure. For a student already clear of the standard-pass threshold and working towards a strong pass, sessions shift earlier towards exam technique and the higher-tariff problem-solving questions that most often separate a grade 4 from a grade 5 or above. Students working towards a resit alongside a sixth-form, college or apprenticeship course follow a compressed version of the same structure, adapted to the shorter timetable a resit allows.

Across all subjects, 91% of Leading Tuition students go on to achieve their desired grades. For GCSE maths in Leicester specifically, that record comes from the same discipline described above: an initial diagnostic against a defined target grade, a topic-by-topic plan built from where the marks are actually being lost, and measurable checkpoints against that target rather than an open-ended series of lessons with no defined destination. Where a student's target is the grade 4 standard pass, progress is checked against the topics most likely to secure it; where the target is grade 5 or above, checkpoints shift towards the higher-tariff problem-solving questions that most often decide the outcome.

For the detail on how the GCSE maths exam itself is structured — tiers, topics and grade boundaries — see our main GCSE maths tuition guide, which covers the exam nationally rather than Leicester specifically. Our wider GCSE tuition service and maths tutoring service both cover every board and tier examined in Leicester's schools, and our Leicester tutoring overview covers subjects beyond GCSE maths.

Common Questions About Leicester's Attainment 8 Score, Named Schools and Grade Thresholds