Liverpool's own 2024/25 GCSE maths results, school by school, set against the city's 34% free-school-meals rate.
Book a Free ConsultationMy son was low in confidence after COVID and the gaps in learning were building up. Using this service helped plug those gaps, rebuild confidence, and improve his ability to learn properly again.
We arranged maths and English tuition ahead of GCSEs and both tutors were brilliant. My daughter's grades improved, and by results day she achieved two grades higher than in her mock exams.
I attended an English bootcamp with Leading Tuition and the experience was excellent. The teacher gave focused attention to the small group while keeping the lessons interactive and engaging.
Liverpool is a local authority in North West England where 65% of pupils achieved grade 4 or above and 45% achieved grade 5 or above in GCSE mathematics in 2024/25, against a free-school-meals eligibility rate of 34.0% among the city's schoolchildren. The Department for Education's own Key Stage 4 data, covered here school by school, includes no Progress 8 score for 2024/25 - the measure has been suspended nationally for the second year running.
According to Department for Education figures reported in the January 2025 school census, 26,613 children in Liverpool - 34.0% of the city's state-school population - were eligible for free school meals, following the widening of Universal Credit-linked eligibility rules. Free school meal eligibility is the standard proxy the Department itself uses when it publishes attainment gaps by disadvantage at national level: in every national disadvantage-gap release, pupils who have ever been eligible for free school meals record markedly lower Attainment 8 scores, on average, than pupils who have not. A local authority with a third of its pupils in that eligible group starts from a different position than one with a much smaller eligible population, before a single maths lesson is taught.
The Department does not publish a Liverpool-specific GCSE maths breakdown split by free-school-meal status inside the local-authority tables used elsewhere on this page - that split exists only in the national disadvantage-gap release, not at local-authority level - so the two headline maths figures reported here, 65% achieving grade 4 or above and 45% achieving grade 5 or above in 2024/25, are the city-wide rates across all pupils, not a disadvantage-adjusted score. What the 34.0% free-school-meals rate does make clear is that comparing Liverpool's raw percentage against a local authority with a much lower eligible population, such as Kingston upon Thames, covered later on this page, compares two different pupil populations rather than two school systems facing an identical task.
Liverpool's Key Stage 4 performance tables show three consecutive years of GCSE mathematics results for the local authority: 63% of pupils achieved grade 4 or above in 2022/23, rising to 64% in 2023/24 and 65% in 2024/25. The grade 5 or above rate moved from 43% in 2022/23 to 45% in 2023/24, then held at 45% in 2024/25 - a plateau after one year of a two-point rise, rather than a continuing trend in either direction.
| Year / area | Grade 4+ in GCSE maths | Grade 5+ in GCSE maths |
|---|---|---|
| Liverpool, 2022/23 | 63% | 43% |
| Liverpool, 2023/24 | 64% | 45% |
| Liverpool, 2024/25 | 65% | 45% |
| England (state-funded), 2024/25 | 72% | 53% |
Set against England's state-funded average for 2024/25 - 72% at grade 4 or above, 53% at grade 5 or above - Liverpool's three-year gain of two percentage points on each measure has not closed the gap: it stood at 7 percentage points on grade 4+ and 8 percentage points on grade 5+ in 2024/25, figures this page calculates directly from the two DfE-published rates rather than from a DfE-published gap statistic. A two-point gain over three years, if it continued at the same pace, would take roughly a decade to close a seven-point gap on grade 4+ alone - a way to read the scale of the gap, not a forecast of what will actually happen.
No. Liverpool is one of six separate local authorities that make up the Liverpool City Region, alongside Knowsley, Sefton, Wirral, St Helens and Halton, and each reports its own GCSE results to the Department for Education independently. Averaging or blending figures across those six authorities, or reporting a City Region or "Merseyside" number as though it described Liverpool specifically, produces a figure that does not describe any single local authority's schools. This page reports Liverpool's own local-authority figures throughout and does not average across its neighbours.
The scale of the difference between adjacent authorities is real. Knowsley's 2024/25 GCSE mathematics results were 54% at grade 4 or above and 31% at grade 5 or above - 11 and 14 percentage points behind Liverpool's own 65% and 45% - despite the two local authorities sharing a boundary. On the Department's separate combined "grade 5 or above in English and maths" measure, which requires a grade 5 or higher in both subjects rather than maths alone, Knowsley recorded 24.7% for 2024/25, the lowest figure of any local authority in England on that measure; the highest was Kingston upon Thames, at 69.3%, a 44.6 percentage-point national range on that single combined measure. Those two figures describe the English-and-maths measure specifically, not GCSE mathematics alone, and are cited here as range context for how widely local-authority attainment varies nationally, not as a Liverpool statistic.
This page does not carry sourced 2024/25 GCSE maths figures for Sefton, Wirral, St Helens or Halton individually, and does not estimate or average them from Liverpool's or Knowsley's data. A family researching tutoring for a child at a school in one of those four authorities should look up that authority's own Key Stage 4 performance data directly, rather than assume it resembles Liverpool's.
The Department for Education states plainly why: "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." In April 2024, the then government confirmed there will be no replacement measure for those two years either, so this gap in the data is not a delay - it is a fixed feature of the 2024/25 and 2025/26 results nationally, for every local authority, not just Liverpool.
Progress 8 measures how far a pupil's GCSE results moved on from where they started at the end of primary school, rather than what grade they reached in absolute terms - a distinction that matters for a local authority with Liverpool's free-school-meals rate. A local authority can post GCSE maths percentages below the England average while still moving its pupils further, on average, than a wealthier area starting from a higher baseline; Progress 8 is the measure built to show that difference, and Attainment 8 and the grade 4+/grade 5+ percentages on this page are not built to show it. For 2024/25 there is no Progress 8 score to check that against for Liverpool, or for any other local authority, so this year, and next, the only figures available are the absolute attainment rates covered on this page, without the progress context that has previously sat alongside them.
What replaces it, in the Department's own current reporting, is Attainment 8 and its subject-level breakdown - including a maths-specific Attainment 8 element, which is the figure used for the two named Liverpool schools below - together with the grade 5+ English-and-maths measure and the EBacc entry rate, which rose to 40.5% nationally in 2024/25. None of those three measures answers the question Progress 8 did.
Liverpool's city-wide figures average across every secondary school in the local authority. Two named Liverpool schools with published 2024/25 results, Calderstones School and Dixons Croxteth Academy, show how far an individual school's results can sit from that average in either direction.
| School / area | Pupils | Attainment 8 | Maths element (A8) | Grade 5+ English & maths | EBacc entry | EBacc APS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calderstones School | 263 | 46.1 | 9.1 | 43.3% | 58.6% | 4.25 |
| Dixons Croxteth Academy | 51 | 31.6 | 6.2 | 15.7% | 62.7% | 2.97 |
| Liverpool (local authority) | - | 42.1 | 8.3 | 38.1% | 35.8% | 3.64 |
| England (all state schools) | - | 46.1 | 9.1 | 45.4% | 40.5% | 4.09 |
Calderstones' overall Attainment 8 score of 46.1 matches the England state-school average exactly, and its maths-element score of 9.1 does too - both above Liverpool's own local-authority averages of 42.1 and 8.3. Dixons Croxteth Academy's figures run the other way: an Attainment 8 score of 31.6 and a maths element of 6.2 sit well below both the Liverpool and England averages, and its grade 5+ English-and-maths rate of 15.7% is under half the local-authority figure of 38.1%.
One comparison between the two schools cuts against the pattern the other figures suggest. Dixons Croxteth Academy entered a higher proportion of its pupils for the EBacc than Calderstones did - 62.7% against 58.6% - despite its markedly lower overall results. Its EBacc average point score, which reflects the grades those entries actually achieved rather than how many pupils sat them, was 2.97, barely two-thirds of Calderstones' 4.25. Entry rate alone says nothing about the grades a school's pupils go on to achieve.
The two schools also differ sharply in scale: Calderstones' 2024/25 cohort was 263 pupils, more than five times Dixons Croxteth Academy's 51. A smaller cohort is more exposed to swings from year to year caused by a handful of individual results, which is worth keeping in mind when reading a single year's figures for either school.
Leading Tuition's GCSE maths tutors work from a student's own school and exam board - AQA, Edexcel, OCR or WJEC/Eduqas - rather than a generic scheme of work, because grade boundaries and question style differ between boards even within the same subject. Sessions run one-to-one online with a shared whiteboard, so a tutor can work through past-paper questions, mark them against the real mark scheme, and share annotated resources with a student in real time. Our wider GCSE tuition service covers every subject alongside maths for families who need more than one.
Not sure whether your child needs foundation-tier consolidation or a push toward the top grades at higher tier? A short call is enough for us to map a Liverpool GCSE maths student's target grade against their actual school and exam board. Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews, read on 22 August 2026.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppThe figures above are drawn from the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance, 2024/25 statistics and its Compare School and College Performance service, for Calderstones School and Dixons Croxteth Academy specifically, checked on 25 August 2026. For grade boundaries, exam tiers and topic-by-topic revision guidance that apply to GCSE maths students nationally, see our GCSE maths guide.
65% of pupils in Liverpool achieved grade 4 or above in GCSE mathematics in 2024/25, according to the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance data, up from 64% in 2023/24 and 63% in 2022/23. The grade 5 or above rate was 45% in 2024/25, unchanged from 2023/24. Both figures remain behind the England state-funded averages of 72% at grade 4 or above and 53% at grade 5 or above for the same year, a gap of 7 and 8 percentage points respectively.
No. The Department for Education states it is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024/25 or 2025/26, because the relevant pupils have no Key Stage 2 prior-attainment data after primary tests were cancelled during the 2019/20 and 2020/21 COVID-19 disruption. In April 2024 the government confirmed no replacement measure will be introduced for either year. For 2024/25, Attainment 8, its maths element, and the grade 5+ English-and-maths rate are the measures actually published instead.
Knowsley's 2024/25 GCSE mathematics results were 54% at grade 4 or above and 31% at grade 5 or above, against Liverpool's 65% and 45% - an 11 and 14 percentage-point gap between two adjacent local authorities. On the Department for Education's separate combined grade 5+ English-and-maths measure, Knowsley recorded 24.7% for 2024/25, the lowest of any local authority in England on that measure, while Kingston upon Thames recorded the highest, at 69.3%.
No. Liverpool is one of six separate local authorities in the Liverpool City Region - Liverpool, Knowsley, Sefton, Wirral, St Helens and Halton - and each reports its own Department for Education Key Stage 4 results independently. A "Merseyside" or City Region figure blends six different school populations, including Knowsley, which recorded the lowest grade 5+ English-and-maths rate of any local authority in England for 2024/25 at 24.7%. This page reports Liverpool's own local-authority figures throughout, without averaging across its five neighbouring authorities.
Calderstones School's 2024/25 figures are stronger on every headline measure: an Attainment 8 score of 46.1 against Dixons Croxteth Academy's 31.6, a maths-element score of 9.1 against 6.2, and a grade 5+ English-and-maths rate of 43.3% against 15.7%. Dixons Croxteth Academy did enter a higher share of its pupils for the EBacc, 62.7% against Calderstones' 58.6%, but its EBacc average point score of 2.97 was well below Calderstones' 4.25, showing that a higher entry rate did not translate into stronger grades.
26,613 children in Liverpool, 34.0% of the city's state-school population, were eligible for free school meals according to the January 2025 school census, following the widening of Universal Credit-linked eligibility rules. The Department for Education does not publish a Liverpool-specific GCSE maths breakdown by free-school-meal status at local-authority level, so this figure is reported here as context for the city's overall attainment picture rather than as a disadvantage-adjusted maths score.
Grade 4 and grade 5 are both pass grades under the numerical GCSE grading system, with grade 5 the higher of the two; the Department for Education's combined measure requires grade 5 or above in both English and maths GCSEs to count. In Liverpool's 2024/25 results, 65% of pupils reached grade 4 or above in maths while a smaller group, 45%, reached grade 5 or above - the gap between those two figures, 20 percentage points, is the share of Liverpool pupils passing at grade 4 without also reaching grade 5.
For tutoring across other subjects and stages in the city, see our Liverpool tuition hub.
Whichever of Liverpool's secondary schools your child attends, a maths tutor who has actually read that school's own published results starts from a stronger position than one working from a citywide average. 91% of Leading Tuition's students achieve their desired grades, and we are rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot. Explore tutoring across Liverpool or our wider GCSE tuition service.
Book a Free Consultation