Leicester's 2025 key-stage-4 entries for separate Physics and Combined Science, school by school — including where Physics itself sets the published rate.
Book a Free ConsultationLeicester City is a single local education authority, separate from Leicestershire. In 2025, 20.6% of the city's 4,523 state-funded pupils were entered for Biology, Chemistry and Physics as three separate GCSEs — DfE's own school-by-school data shows rates from 82.2% at Fullhurst Community College down to 1.5% at New College Leicester. Our expert GCSE Physics tutors help students across Leicester with both separate Physics and Combined Science, across AQA, Edexcel and OCR.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppSearch results for GCSE Physics tutoring rarely explain this, but it decides which figures on this page even apply to a given pupil. Separate Physics is one of three individual GCSEs — Biology, Chemistry and Physics — each sat and graded on its own, on the standard 9-1 scale. Combined Science is a different qualification entirely: one double-award course covering all three sciences, examined together and reported as two grades on a 17-point scale running from 9-9 down to 1-1. A pupil who takes Combined Science does not receive a GCSE Physics grade at all — their result blends physics, chemistry and biology content, examined in less depth per subject than the separate-science route covers. Most pupils nationally take Combined Science rather than separate sciences, and Leicester's own data, covered below, follows that pattern at most of the city's schools.
Attainment 8, the headline school-performance measure, does not have a distinct “science element” the way it has named English and maths elements. Attainment 8 is built from four components: English, double-weighted; maths, double-weighted; three “EBacc” slots, which must be filled by subjects including a science, a language, and history or geography; and three further open slots for anything else. The Department for Education's own EBacc guidance states plainly that the science requirement is met one of two ways: “GCSE combined science – pupils take 2 GCSEs that cover the 3 main sciences, biology, chemistry and physics” or “3 single sciences at GCSE – pupils choose 3 subjects from biology, chemistry, physics and computer science.” Science sits inside the EBacc bucket alongside those other subjects, not as a bucket of its own.
One further absence is worth flagging before any results are quoted: the Department for Education states directly, on its own school-comparison service, that it “is not able to calculate Progress 8 scores for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26,” because pupils sitting GCSEs in those years had no key stage 2 baseline after primary assessments were cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic. That applies to every school named on this page and to every school in England — it is not a gap specific to Leicester or to Physics.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppBefore naming individual schools, the honest starting point is the city-wide rate, and getting the geography — and the population it covers — right matters as much as the qualification. Leicester City is a unitary authority in its own right, entirely separate from Leicestershire, the surrounding county — the Department for Education reports the two areas as distinct rows, and neither figure includes the other. DfE's citywide rate for Leicester is a state-funded-schools figure: 20.6% of 4,523 pupils at the city's state-funded schools at the end of key stage 4 in 2025 were entered for Biology, Chemistry and Physics as three separate GCSEs — a single measure that only counts a pupil once they are entered for all three, so it is exactly as much a Physics figure as a Biology or Chemistry one. That 4,523 is narrower than the 44 secondary schools and colleges DfE separately lists for the city, several of them independent, each with its own published rate. Leicestershire's rate, from its own 7,862 pupils, was slightly higher at 21.9%. Both sit below England's state-funded average of 23.3%, and below England's all-schools average of 22.4% calculated across 700,688 pupils.
A single city-wide figure of 20.6% averages over schools whose own rates differ enormously. The next section moves past the handful of schools every Leicester tutoring guide already names — Fullhurst Community College at the very top, New College Leicester at the very bottom — to a wider slice of the city's 44 secondaries that rarely gets covered at all.
The Department for Education publishes a school-by-school breakdown of the same “entering for biology, chemistry and physics” measure, and its own subjects-entered tables give the actual GCSE Physics entry count behind most schools' rates. Rather than repeat the small group of Leicester schools already covered on this site's GCSE Chemistry and GCSE Biology pages for Leicester, the table below covers twelve further Leicester City secondaries — a genuine middle band of the city's 44 schools, from close to a fifth of pupils on the separate-science route down to well under a twentieth.
| School | GCSE Physics entries | Entering Biology, Chemistry & Physics |
|---|---|---|
| Al-Aqsa Schools Trust (independent) | 3 | 20.0% |
| Madani Boys School | 6* | 19.3% |
| Crown Hills Community College | 53 | 18.4% |
| Castle Mead Academy | 43 | 17.5% |
| Soar Valley College | 52 | 16.8% |
| Lancaster Academy | 35 | 16.1% |
| The City of Leicester College | 40 | 14.8% |
| Avanti Fields School | 27 | 14.7% |
| Babington Academy | 38 | 14.1% |
| Beaumont Leys School | 28 | 13.5% |
| Orchard Mead Academy | 27 | 12.1% |
| Moat Community College | 8 | 3.8% |
*Madani Boys School's published 19.3% rate is DfE's own figure from its achievement-measures page; its subjects-entered table does not reconcile with that figure for this school — see the dedicated section below.
Al-Aqsa Schools Trust, a small independent school with just 15 pupils at the end of key stage 4, tops this middle band at 20.0% — close to Leicester City's own citywide average — from only 3 pupils on the separate-science route. Crown Hills Community College (288 pupils), Castle Mead Academy (246 pupils) and Soar Valley College (309 pupils) cluster closely between 16.8% and 18.4%, each entering between 43 and 53 pupils for GCSE Physics. At the foot of this table, Moat Community College enters just 8 pupils for Physics out of 213 — a 3.8% rate, well below every other school named on this page, though still well above the eight Leicester secondaries recorded at a genuine 0.0% covered on this site's sibling GCSE Chemistry page.
Whichever end of that table your child's school sits at, our expert GCSE Physics tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real qualification, not an assumed one.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppDfE's “entering for biology, chemistry and physics” percentage is not really a Biology figure, a Chemistry figure or a Physics figure on its own — a pupil is only counted once they are entered for all three, so the published rate is fixed by whichever of the three subjects has the fewest entries at that school. Eleven of the twelve schools in the table above enter identical numbers for Biology, Chemistry and Physics, so the distinction never shows. One does not.
| School | Biology GCSE | Chemistry GCSE | Physics GCSE | Science: Double Award GCSE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beaumont Leys School | 33 | 28 | 28 | 171 |
At Beaumont Leys School, Biology recorded 33 entries in 2025 against just 28 each for Chemistry and Physics — and the school's published triple-science rate, 13.5%, is exactly 28 of its 208 pupils, not 33. A pupil sitting Biology at Beaumont Leys was, on this evidence, more likely to be entered for Biology alone than for the full triple-science set: five Beaumont Leys pupils recorded a Biology entry without a matching Chemistry or Physics entry that year.
This is the mirror image of what this site's sibling GCSE Chemistry page found elsewhere in Leicester: at two other Leicester City secondaries, Chemistry alone was the strict minimum, below both Biology and Physics; at a third, Chemistry and Physics tied as the joint-lowest, exactly as they do at Beaumont Leys. Across every Leicester City secondary with a published, non-zero rate checked across this page and its Chemistry sibling — 21 schools in total — Physics has not once been recorded as the sole lowest of the three subjects on its own. When the three counts diverge in Leicester, Chemistry is either the strict minimum by itself, or ties with Physics as the joint-lowest; Physics has never yet been lower than Chemistry alone among the schools checked. That pattern is specific to the Leicester schools checked for these two pages, not a general rule about the three sciences — DfE's own school-level data can show the opposite elsewhere in England, so this page makes no claim about any school outside Leicester City.
Whether your child's school ties Physics with Chemistry or not, our expert GCSE Physics tutors help students across Leicester build a programme around their own school's real subject entries, not a citywide assumption.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppMadani Boys School's own published figures do not reconcile with each other, and this page flags that rather than paper over it with a derived number. DfE's additional-entry-and-achievement-measures page for the school records 88 pupils at the end of key stage 4 in 2025 and a published rate of 19.3% entering for Biology, Chemistry and Physics — implying roughly 17 matched pupils, since 19.3% of 88 is 17.0. Yet the school's own subjects-entered table for the same year lists just 6 entries each for Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
Those two figures cannot both describe the same 88-pupil cohort, and the rest of the school's own subjects-entered table confirms it: English Language shows 172 entries and Mathematics 171 — more entries than the school has pupils at the end of key stage 4, for subjects almost every pupil would normally sit once. Every other Leicester City school checked for this page and its sibling GCSE Chemistry page reconciles cleanly: each school's Biology, Chemistry or Physics entry count, divided by its own KS4 pupil total, reproduces its published triple-science rate to one decimal place. Madani Boys School is the one exception found.
The likely explanation is that the subjects-entered table draws on a different population than the achievement-measures page for this particular school — perhaps entries recorded across more than one year group or exam series — but this page has not been able to confirm which population the subjects-entered figures actually cover, so it does not attempt to derive a GCSE Physics entry count for Madani Boys School beyond DfE's own published 19.3% rate. Families comparing Madani Boys School's science provision against any other Leicester school should treat 19.3% as the reliable figure and its subject-by-subject entry table as unreliable for this specific purpose.
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Away from entry rates, GCSE Physics itself carries requirements the other two sciences do not share to the same degree. Ofqual's own regulatory conditions for GCSE single sciences set a different mathematical-skills floor for each of the three subjects: a GCSE Biology qualification must devote no less than 10% of the marks allocated to its assessment objectives to mathematical skills, a GCSE Chemistry qualification no less than 20%, and a GCSE Physics qualification no less than 30% — three times Biology's floor and one and a half times Chemistry's, confirmed directly in Ofqual's own published conditions document for single-science GCSEs. A pupil who finds Combined Science's maths content manageable is not guaranteed to find separate Physics equally manageable: the regulatory floor rises specifically for Physics, regardless of exam board.
Physics also carries its own required practical activities, separate from those set for Biology or Chemistry. AQA's own GCSE Physics specification confirms eight required practical activities that pupils must complete during the course, each laid out in the specification itself, with questions testing what pupils have learned from carrying them out worth at least 15% of the qualification's marks, by AQA's own account. A student moving from Combined Science to full separate Physics partway through Year 10 or Year 11 is therefore not simply adding content to revise — they are taking on a qualification with its own required practicals and a higher mathematical-skills floor than either sister science, worth confirming with a school directly rather than assuming from a subject name alone.
If required practicals or the maths content are the sticking point, our expert GCSE Physics tutors help students across Leicester work through equations, required practicals and past papers for their own exam board.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppAQA, Edexcel and OCR all offer separate Physics and Combined Science GCSEs, and a Leicester pupil's actual exam depends on which specification their own school has chosen — not on any citywide standard. AQA's two relevant specifications are confirmed directly on its own website: GCSE Physics carries the code 8463, and GCSE Combined Science: Trilogy carries the code 8464. Pearson Edexcel's own GCSE Physics specification document confirms its code as 1PH0. OCR offers two distinct Physics specifications of its own: Gateway Science Physics A, confirmed as code J249 on OCR's own qualification page, and Twenty First Century Science Physics B, confirmed as code J259.
None of the marketplace directories ranking for “GCSE Physics tutors in Leicester” — Tutor Hunt, Tutor House and Superprof among the top organic results — name a single Leicester school, a single exam board, or a Leicester-specific DfE figure; each lists individual tutor profiles with generic subject descriptions. Knowing the specification matters in practice: past papers, grade boundaries, required practicals and topic lists are all specification-specific, so a student revising from the wrong board's materials can waste real study time on content their own exam does not cover. Our tutors confirm a student's board and specification directly from their own school before building any revision plan.
Whether a Leicester pupil is one of the 20.0% at Al-Aqsa Schools Trust sitting three separate sciences, or one of the far larger group elsewhere in the city working towards Combined Science, the starting point is the same: confirming which qualification, tier and exam board actually applies to that pupil's own school, rather than assuming from a city average. Our diagnostic assessment for every new Leicester GCSE Physics student begins there, then builds a programme from a pupil's own mock results and topic-by-topic gaps.
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 or OCR — whether that is one paper of a Combined Science double award or the full separate-science route, equations and required practicals included. 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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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppFor related subjects and levels, see our national GCSE Physics guide and our Physics tutoring service, our wider GCSE tuition across every subject, and our other Leicester subject pages for GCSE Chemistry and GCSE 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.
They are different qualifications. Separate Physics is one of three individual GCSEs — Biology, Chemistry and Physics — each graded on the 9-1 scale. Combined Science is a single double-award qualification covering all three sciences, producing two grades on a 17-point scale running from 9-9 down to 1-1. A pupil taking Combined Science receives no GCSE Physics grade at all: their result reflects biology, chemistry and physics content combined, in less depth per subject than the separate-science route. At Beaumont Leys School in Leicester, Biology recorded 33 entries in 2025 against 28 each for Chemistry and Physics — DfE's own published triple-science rate of 13.5% works out to exactly 28 of the school's 208 pupils, the matched count set jointly by Chemistry and Physics, not by Biology's higher total.
The Department for Education recorded 20.6% of Leicester City's 4,523 pupils at state-funded schools at the end of key stage 4 in 2025 entering for Biology, Chemistry and Physics as three separate GCSEs, below the England state-funded average of 23.3% the same year. DfE's own school-by-school table lists 44 secondary schools and colleges for Leicester City altogether, and away from the two schools most often named — Fullhurst Community College's 82.2% at the very top and New College Leicester's 1.5% at the very bottom — a wide middle band of Leicester schools sits between roughly a fifth and a twentieth of their pupils on the separate-science route, each with its own published rate.
Among the twelve Leicester City secondaries this page tracks in detail — deliberately a different set from the schools already covered on this site's GCSE Chemistry and GCSE Biology pages for Leicester — Al-Aqsa Schools Trust records the highest rate, 20.0% of its 15 pupils, and Moat Community College the lowest, 3.8% of its 213 pupils, with GCSE Physics entry counts of 3 and 8 respectively. Both figures come directly from the Department for Education's own 2025 key stage 4 data for each named school.
At Beaumont Leys School. DfE's 'entering for biology, chemistry and physics' measure only counts a pupil once they are entered for all three, so the published rate is fixed by whichever subject or subjects have the fewest entries. At Beaumont Leys, Biology had 33 entries against 28 each for Chemistry and Physics — the school's published rate, 13.5%, is exactly 28 of its 208 pupils, the count Physics and Chemistry share. Across every Leicester City secondary with a published non-zero rate checked for this page and its sibling GCSE Chemistry page, Physics has not once been the sole lowest subject on its own — it either matches Biology and Chemistry exactly, or ties with Chemistry as the joint-lowest, the same pattern seen at Judgemeadow Community College.
The Department for Education's own two tables for Madani Boys School do not reconcile. Its additional-entry-and-achievement-measures page records 88 pupils at the end of key stage 4 in 2025 and a published triple-science rate of 19.3% — a matched count of roughly 17 pupils. Yet the school's own subjects-entered table for the same year lists just 6 entries each for Biology, Chemistry and Physics, alongside 172 entries for English Language and 171 for Mathematics — entry counts that only make sense for a considerably larger population than 88. This page cites Madani Boys School's DfE-published 19.3% rate, sourced directly from its achievement-measures page, but does not derive a GCSE Physics entry count from its subjects-entered table, since the two DfE tables for this specific school do not describe the same population.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppNo. Leicester City is a unitary authority in its own right, entirely separate from Leicestershire, which covers the surrounding county. The Department for Education reports the two areas separately: Leicester City recorded 20.6% of its 4,523 key stage 4 pupils entering for Biology, Chemistry and Physics as separate GCSEs in 2025, against 21.9% of Leicestershire's 7,862 pupils. Neither figure includes the other, so a source that treats “Leicester” as covering the whole county is combining two different local authorities' data.
No. Attainment 8 has four components: English, double-weighted; maths, double-weighted; three “EBacc” slots, which must include a science, a language and history or geography among the approved options; and three further open slots. The Department for Education's own EBacc guidance states pupils meet the science requirement either through “GCSE combined science – pupils take 2 GCSEs that cover the 3 main sciences” or “3 single sciences at GCSE – pupils choose 3 subjects from biology, chemistry, physics and computer science.” There is no dedicated science element of Attainment 8 the way English and maths each have their own named, double-weighted element.
The Department for Education states on its own Compare School and College Performance service that it “is not able to calculate Progress 8 scores for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26,” because the pupils sitting GCSEs in those years had no key stage 2 assessment data to build a baseline from, after primary tests were cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic. This applies to every school in Leicester, Leicestershire and the rest of England equally, and no city or county anywhere can report a Progress 8 score for either year.
Ofqual's own regulatory conditions for GCSE single sciences set a different mathematical-skills floor for each of the three subjects: a GCSE Biology qualification must devote no less than 10% of the marks allocated to its assessment objectives to mathematical skills, a GCSE Chemistry qualification no less than 20%, and a GCSE Physics qualification no less than 30% — three times Biology's floor and one and a half times Chemistry's, confirmed directly in Ofqual's own published conditions document. AQA's own GCSE Physics specification separately confirms eight required practical activities that pupils must complete during the course, laid out in the specification itself.
AQA, Edexcel and OCR all offer both qualifications in England, each under the boards' own confirmed specification codes. AQA's GCSE Physics specification carries the code 8463, confirmed on AQA's own website, alongside its Combined Science: Trilogy specification, code 8464. Pearson Edexcel's own GCSE Physics specification document confirms its code as 1PH0. OCR offers two separate Physics specifications: Gateway Science Physics A, code J249, and Twenty First Century Science Physics B, code J259, both confirmed directly on OCR's own qualification pages. Which board and which specification a Leicester pupil sits depends entirely on their own school's choice, not on the city or county they live in, so families should check with their child's school directly rather than assume a single board applies city-wide.
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