Liverpool's own 2024/25 GCSE Religious Studies results, and why 16 of the city's faith schools enter pupils for the exam while most of the rest don't.
Book a Free ConsultationLiverpool is a local authority in North West England where 2,645 pupils were entered for GCSE Religious Studies in 2024/25, achieving 60% at grade 4 or above - entered at 25 of the city's 39 state-funded secondary schools, and at all 16 with a designated religious character.
Whether your child's school enters almost every pupil for GCSE Religious Studies or only a handful, the right preparation starts from the actual specification and paper format. Our expert Religious Studies tutors help students across Liverpool with the current AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas/WJEC specifications.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppTeaching religious education and entering pupils for the GCSE are two different legal questions, and Liverpool's own school data shows exactly how far they can diverge. Section 80(1)(a) of the Education Act 2002 requires the curriculum for every maintained school in England to "comprise a basic curriculum which includes... provision for religious education for all registered pupils at the school", and section 69 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 places the duty to secure this on the local authority, the governing body and the head teacher, "subject to section 71" - the section that gives parents a right to withdraw their child, wholly or partly, from religious education and from collective worship. Academies and free schools, which now run most of Liverpool's secondaries, are not bound by this legislation directly: the Department for Education's own published guidance states plainly that "all schools must provide religious education and daily acts of collective worship as set out in legislation for local-authority-maintained schools and funding agreements for academies and free schools" - meaning the duty reaches an academy through its individual contract with the Secretary of State, not through the same statute. Nowhere in any of this is a school required to enter a single pupil for the GCSE examination itself - that is a curriculum choice each school makes on top of the teaching duty, not a consequence of it.
Querying the Department's 2024/25 school-level exam data shows exactly how Liverpool's 39 state-funded secondary schools with a Key Stage 4 cohort split on that choice. 25 schools entered at least one pupil for GCSE Religious Studies, entering 2,641 pupils between them against a Liverpool-wide total of 2,645 (the 4-pupil gap is ordinary DfE rounding and small-cell suppression); the remaining 14 recorded no GCSE Religious Studies entry of any kind in 2024/25. Three schools that appeared in this page's own school-level data queries were excluded from that count of 39 after a direct GIAS check confirmed each as an independent school - Christian Fellowship School (URN 104730, entering 19 pupils for the GCSE) and Auckland College (URN 132119) among Liverpool's seven "Other independent school" establishments, plus Progress Schools - Liverpool, ES Independent School, Prudentia Education and Nazene Danielle School of Performing Arts, none of which are part of the state-funded population. Two further schools - St Vincent's School and the Royal School for the Blind (Liverpool) - are GIAS-classified as "Non-maintained special school", a distinct category from the eight LA-maintained "Community special school" establishments that do count in the 39, and were excluded on that basis; a further school, LIPA School, is a state-funded free school but recorded zero pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 in 2024/25 and was excluded for having no cohort to measure.
| Liverpool state-funded secondaries, 2024/25 | Schools |
|---|---|
| Enter GCSE Religious Studies | 25 |
| No recorded GCSE Religious Studies entry | 14 |
| Total | 39 |
The Department's own 2024/25 datasets add one further complication worth being precise about, and worth checking harder than a single glance at the field allows: GCSE Religious Studies exists as a Full Course and a Short Course at four of the five exam boards checked for this page, but the two DfE Key Stage 4 datasets used here - the local-authority subject-entries data and the school-level exam data - label every standard GCSE entry, in Religious Studies and in every other subject nationwide, with the identical string "GCSE (9-1) Full Course". No "Short Course" value exists anywhere in either dataset's qualification field, for any subject, at any school: querying the school-level dataset for every Religious Studies row nationwide returns 26,464 rows labelled "GCSE (9-1) Full Course" and a further 12 labelled "GCE AS level" - 26,476 in total, with zero rows of any other label. That is not evidence any individual row means "full course only" - it is the only GCSE-type value the field has ever taken for this subject, nationally, so it cannot distinguish a full course from a short course at all, and this page cannot rule out that Short Course entries are counted inside these same figures, published somewhere else entirely, or genuinely absent from Liverpool's schools. Every entries and results figure on this page should be read as GCSE Religious Studies of unconfirmed course length, not as a verified Full-Course-only count. Families should ask their own school which route it actually enters pupils for - a short call is the fastest way to check, and a good place to start is to book a free consultation.
Yes, and the gap is the sharpest found on any Liverpool GCSE subject page in this series. Cross-referencing the 39-school partition above against each school's GIAS-listed religious character - never taken from a school's name - shows that all 16 of Liverpool's state secondaries with a designated religious character entered pupils for GCSE Religious Studies in 2024/25: 8 voluntary aided schools (Church of England or Roman Catholic), 4 academies with a Church of England, Roman Catholic or joint designation, King David High School (the city's one Jewish school) and two academies whose religious character GIAS records as "Other Christian faith" for a joint Church of England/Roman Catholic designation. Between them these 16 schools entered 2,327 pupils, or 86.2% of their own combined 2,701-pupil Key Stage 4 cohort. Among Liverpool's 23 state secondaries with no religious character, only 9 entered any pupils at all for the GCSE, together entering 314 pupils - just 11.8% of their combined 2,660-pupil cohort. This is a Leading Tuition calculation from GIAS's own religious-character field and the Department's own school-level exam data, not a single published statistic.
| Liverpool secondaries by religious character, 2024/25 | Schools | Combined KS4 cohort | Entering GCSE RS | Entries as % of cohort |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Designated religious character (CofE, RC, Jewish, joint) | 16 | 2,701 | 16 of 16 | 86.2% |
| No religious character | 23 | 2,660 | 9 of 23 | 11.8% |
Neither side of that split is absolute, and the two exceptions matter as much as the pattern. Liverpool College - a Church of England academy, GIAS URN 139686, Diocese of Liverpool - entered just 13 of its own 148 pupils (8.8%), behaving like a typical non-faith school despite its designated character. Running the other way, two academies within the Dixons Academies Trust with no religious character at all - Dixons Broadgreen Academy (149 of 167 pupils, 89.2%) and Dixons Croxteth Academy (45 of 51 pupils, 88.2%) - entered almost their entire cohort, matching the near-universal pattern seen at most of the faith schools rather than the small-minority pattern typical of Liverpool's other non-faith entrants (Calderstones School 7.2%, Holly Lodge Girls' College 7.9%, Alsop High School 3.6%). Faith designation is a strong predictor here, not a rule with no exceptions - a distinction worth checking for your own child's specific school rather than assuming from its type.
2,645 pupils were entered for GCSE Religious Studies in Liverpool in 2024/25, achieving 60% at grade 4 or above and 47% at grade 5 or above - both well below England's state-funded rates of 71% and 60%, gaps of 11 and 13 percentage points that are the widest recorded on any Liverpool GCSE subject page built in this series so far. Liverpool's entries dipped from 2,569 in 2022/23 to 2,443 in 2023/24 (-4.9%), then recovered to 2,645 in 2024/25 (+8.3%); England's entries moved differently across the same three years, holding almost flat from 210,323 to 210,776 (+0.2%) before falling back to 204,914 in 2024/25 (-2.8%) - Liverpool's dip-then-recovery is not simply a smaller version of a national trend, it runs in a different shape entirely. Grade 4+ achievement in Liverpool moved from 59% to 61% to 60% across the three years; grade 5+ moved from 46% to 48% to 47%. England's own rates were more stable across the same span: grade 4+ from 71% to 71% to 71%, grade 5+ from 60% to 61% to 60%.
| Year | Liverpool entries | Liverpool 4+/5+ | England entries | England 4+/5+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022/23 | 2,569 | 59% / 46% | 210,323 | 71% / 60% |
| 2023/24 | 2,443 | 61% / 48% | 210,776 | 71% / 61% |
| 2024/25 | 2,645 | 60% / 47% | 204,914 | 71% / 60% |
All of the England figures above are the Department's state-funded schools rate, not the "England - all schools" rate DfE also publishes separately with independent schools included - the two are not interchangeable, and this page uses the state-funded row throughout to match Liverpool's own entirely state-funded population. Whichever year or measure your family is comparing, a short call is the fastest way to see where your own child's school and results sit against these figures.
It is a fair question - Religious Studies carries no EBacc pillar of its own, so it competes for space in the same finite optional blocks as every other non-EBacc subject - but Liverpool's own school-level figures do not support a squeeze. Taking the 36 of Liverpool's 39 state-funded secondaries with usable, non-suppressed 2024/25 EBacc-entry-rate and pupil-count data (Palmerston School, Redbridge High School and Sandfield Park School were excluded for suppressed figures), and comparing each school's EBacc entry rate against its own GCSE Religious Studies entries as a share of its Key Stage 4 cohort, produces a Pearson correlation coefficient of +0.135 - close to zero, and weaker than the relationship several other cities in this batch have already found and just as inconsistent in direction. A median split tells the same story: the 18 schools at or above Liverpool's own median EBacc entry rate (27.4%) averaged a 49.5% Religious Studies entry rate, against 40.7% for the 18 schools below the median - a small positive gap, not the negative one a squeezed-option-block theory would predict, and one that shrinks further (Pearson r=+0.211) once The Blue Coat School, an extreme outlier on both measures, is excluded. This correlation is a Leading Tuition calculation built from the Department's own published school-level figures, not a statistic the Department publishes itself.
The likelier explanation, as on this site's other Liverpool GCSE subject pages, is a shared underlying driver rather than a causal squeeze: schools that enter a larger share of their cohort for the EBacc tend to enter a larger share for GCSEs generally. But for Religious Studies specifically, EBacc rate is not even the strongest available predictor - religious character is. The gap between Liverpool's 16 faith schools (86.2% entry) and its 23 non-faith schools (11.8% entry) is far starker than anything EBacc rate on its own explains, which is why this page leads with religious character rather than EBacc pressure. Families should not assume either figure tells them what their own school does - the only way to know is to ask, or book a free consultation and we'll help you find out.
Liverpool's Religious Studies entries lean towards girls more than most of this site's other Liverpool GCSE subject pages, and the direction matches England's own pattern. Girls made up 1,403 of Liverpool's 2,645 GCSE Religious Studies entries in 2024/25 (53.0%) against 1,242 boys (47.0%), close to England's own 110,418-girl, 94,496-boy split (54.7%/45.3%). Results follow the same direction more sharply than entries do: Liverpool's girls achieved 67% at grade 4 or above against boys' 52%, a 15-point gap, and 55% at grade 5 or above against boys' 38%, a 17-point gap - both wider than England's own 77%/65% and 66%/53% splits on the same thresholds.
| GCSE Religious Studies, 2024/25 | Entries | Grade 4+ | Grade 5+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liverpool - Boys | 1,242 (47.0%) | 52% | 38% |
| Liverpool - Girls | 1,403 (53.0%) | 67% | 55% |
| England - Boys | 94,496 (45.3%) | 65% | 53% |
| England - Girls | 110,418 (54.7%) | 77% | 66% |
The Blue Coat School, a 176-pupil-cohort academy with no religious character, enters only a small, selective slice of its own cohort for GCSE Religious Studies - 23 pupils, 13.1% - but every one of them achieved grade 4 or above, and every one achieved grade 5 or above, a perfect result on both thresholds and the strongest recorded on this page. That is a sharply different pattern from Liverpool's faith schools, most of which enter almost their entire cohort with a much wider grade spread. King David High School, the city's one Jewish-designated school, entered 109 of its 114 pupils (95.6%) and posted the strongest results among the near-universal entrants: 78.9% at grade 4 or above and 67.0% at grade 5 or above. St Hilda's Church of England High School entered 162 of 171 pupils (94.7%), reaching 74.7% and 63.6% at the two thresholds. Broughton Hall Catholic High School, Liverpool's highest-volume entrant, entered 187 of its 198 pupils (94.4%) - more than any other school in the city - reaching 46.0% at grade 4 or above and 36.4% at grade 5 or above, closer to the city median than the church-designated schools above it in scale. Liverpool College's own small entry of 13 pupils reached 76.9% at both thresholds, showing that even the one faith school with a low entry rate produces strong results among the minority it does enter.
| School, 2024/25 | GCSE RS entries | Cohort | Entry rate | Grade 4+ | Grade 5+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Blue Coat School | 23 | 176 | 13.1% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| King David High School | 109 | 114 | 95.6% | 78.9% | 67.0% |
| St Hilda's CofE High School | 162 | 171 | 94.7% | 74.7% | 63.6% |
| Liverpool College | 13 | 148 | 8.8% | 76.9% | 76.9% |
| Broughton Hall Catholic High School | 187 | 198 | 94.4% | 46.0% | 36.4% |
Whichever pattern your own child's school follows - near-universal entry or a small selective group - a tutor who starts from the right specification and paper format saves time. Book a free consultation and we'll confirm it with you.
Five awarding bodies offer a GCSE Religious Studies qualification to English and Welsh schools, and two of them offer more than one specification - checking a single code per board would have missed both. AQA runs three: Religious Studies A (8062, discount code DD1) with its own Short Course (8061, discount code 4610); and a separate specification, Religious Studies B (8063, discount code DD1), built around a compulsory Catholic Christianity component and options in Islam or Judaism, with no Short Course of its own. All three were first taught from September 2016 with first exams in 2018, and all three specification PDFs carry a minor version update dated 1 September 2025 without any change to the teaching-from date. Pearson Edexcel likewise runs two specifications, not one - Religious Studies A (1RA0, Ofqual qualification number 603/0079/6) and a themed alternative, Religious Studies B "Beliefs in Action" (1RB0, QN 603/0063/2, built around Religion and Ethics, Religion Peace and Conflict, and Religion Philosophy and Social Justice) - both Issue 2, dated January 2024, and both explicitly described in Edexcel's own Religious Studies B specification as "one of two GCSE Religious Studies qualifications offered" and part of "our suite of two full course GCSE Religious Studies" qualifications. A full-text search of both complete specification PDFs (216 pages combined) found no mention of a Short Course at either. OCR offers one specification with two course lengths - Full Course J625 (Ofqual qualification number 601/8594/6) and Short Course J125 (QN 601/8712/8); OCR's own site marks the Short Course specification PDF as updated within the past month of this check, though this page cannot confirm what, if anything, changed in its content.
Eduqas lists its GCSE (9-1) in Religious Studies under Qual Code C120QS with a separate Short Course, C125QT, and a single Ofqual qualification number, 601/8879/0, shown against both codes on Eduqas's own reference table. Internally, the Full Course covers two teaching routes - Route A ("Religious, Philosophical and Ethical studies and Christianity, Islam and Judaism") and Route B ("Catholic Christianity and Judaism") - without a separate entry code for either. WJEC, Eduqas's Welsh sister board, sells the same underlying qualification under its own codes - 3120QS (Full Course) and 3125QT (Short Course), sharing Eduqas's exact Ofqual qualification number 601/8879/0 and its own Welsh accreditation number (QWADN) C00/1167/3 - but WJEC additionally lists a third, distinct entry code, 3121QS, labelled specifically "Catholic Theology and Judaism": the same content Eduqas teaches only as an internal route of its single C120QS code, given its own separate examination entry code at WJEC. Between them, AQA's Religious Studies B and WJEC's 3121QS give two of the five boards a Catholic-content-specific route with its own distinct entry code - directly relevant to a city with as many Catholic-designated secondaries as Liverpool - while Edexcel's second specification is a general ethics-and-philosophy theme, not Catholic-specific. Checked against every board and specification that offers a Short Course, only Pearson Edexcel among the five boards - across both of its specifications - does not offer one at all.
| Board | Specification | Full Course code | Short Course code | QN / QWADN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AQA | Religious Studies A | 8062 (discount code DD1) | 8061 (discount code 4610) | not published by AQA on either spec |
| AQA | Religious Studies B (Catholic-focused) | 8063 (discount code DD1) | No Short Course offered | not published by AQA |
| Pearson Edexcel | Religious Studies A | 1RA0 (discount code DD1) | No Short Course offered | QN 603/0079/6 |
| Pearson Edexcel | Religious Studies B "Beliefs in Action" | 1RB0 | No Short Course offered | QN 603/0063/2 |
| OCR | Religious Studies | J625 | J125 | QN 601/8594/6 (Full) / 601/8712/8 (Short) |
| Eduqas | Religious Studies | C120QS | C125QT | QN 601/8879/0 (shown for both) |
| WJEC | Religious Studies (+ Catholic Theology and Judaism) | 3120QS (+ 3121QS Catholic Theology and Judaism) | 3125QT | QN 601/8879/0; QWADN C00/1167/3 |
With three specifications at AQA, two at Pearson Edexcel and three separate codes at WJEC, getting the right one matters before a single revision session starts - book a free consultation and we'll confirm your child's exact board and route first.
No - Religious Studies sits in the same part of the Attainment 8 measure as this site's other non-EBacc Liverpool GCSE subject pages, because it carries no EBacc pillar of its own. Attainment 8 is built from four buckets filling eight GCSE-equivalent slots: English counts twice, maths counts twice, three slots go to a pupil's best results from the EBacc group (sciences, a language, history or geography), and a final three go to any other qualifications, the "open" group. Every Religious Studies result competes only for those three open-group slots, alongside subjects like art, PE, business and other vocational qualifications - never for an EBacc slot. Liverpool's average score across that open-group bucket was 12.7 in 2024/25 against 13.6 for England, a smaller 0.9-point gap than the wider 42.1-versus-46 difference on Attainment 8 as a whole, and in both Liverpool and England pupils filled an average of 2.7 of the 3 available open slots - the bucket runs close to capacity regardless of location, which is part of why a genuinely popular open-group subject like Religious Studies still has to compete hard for space at any one school.
Leading Tuition's GCSE Religious Studies tutors work from a student's own school, exam board and route - AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR or Eduqas/WJEC, Full Course or Short Course - rather than a generic scheme of work built for none of them. Sessions run one-to-one online with a shared whiteboard, so a tutor can work through past-paper extended-writing and evaluation questions on the correct specification, mark them against the real mark scheme, and build the argument-construction technique every board's Religious Studies paper now expects. Because Religious Studies shares a strong essay-based, evaluative skill set with other humanities GCSEs, families comparing subjects may also find our History tutor page useful; our GCSE tuition service covers every subject alongside Religious Studies for families who need more than one. Families in Liverpool wanting a different GCSE subject can also see our GCSE History tutors in Liverpool and GCSE English tutors in Liverpool pages, and families researching tutoring in other cities can browse every location we cover.
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Whichever route your child's school actually enters them for - Full Course or Short Course, and whichever exam board - our expert Religious Studies tutors help students across Liverpool build the extended-writing technique the subject rewards. 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 Liverpool and England figures above are drawn from the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance, 2024/25 release and its open subject-entry and school-level datasets, queried directly on 2 September 2026; the correlation between EBacc entry rate and Religious Studies entries, and the religious-character cross-tabulation, are Leading Tuition calculations built from those same published figures and from each school's own Get Information about Schools record, fetched directly for every school named on this page. The legal duty to teach religious education is drawn from the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, section 69, the Education Act 2002, section 80, and the Department for Education's own guidance on academies and free schools. Exam board details are drawn from AQA's, Pearson Edexcel's, OCR's, Eduqas's and WJEC's own GCSE Religious Studies specification pages and PDFs, read directly on 2 September 2026. For wider support across every GCSE subject, see our GCSE resources for parents guide.
60% of the 2,645 pupils entered for GCSE Religious Studies in Liverpool achieved grade 4 or above in 2024/25, and 47% achieved grade 5 or above, according to the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance data for state-funded schools. Both figures sit well below England's own state-funded rates of 71% and 60% - one of the widest gaps recorded on any Liverpool GCSE subject page in this series. DfE's own dataset labels every standard GCSE Religious Studies row "GCSE (9-1) Full Course", but that exact string is the only qualification-type value the field ever takes for this subject - it does not distinguish a full course from a short course, and no dataset used for this page can confirm whether any Short Course entries are counted within this same figure, published elsewhere, or absent.
No. Of Liverpool's 39 state-funded secondary schools with a 2024/25 Key Stage 4 cohort, 25 entered at least one pupil for GCSE Religious Studies and 14 entered none, according to the Department for Education's school-level exam data, independently verified against each school's Get Information about Schools (GIAS) record - DfE's own field cannot distinguish a full course from a short course, so these figures cover both together. Entering no pupils for the GCSE does not mean a school skips religious education altogether - every maintained school and academy has a separate legal duty to teach it, which is not the same thing as entering pupils for this specific qualification.
Yes, decisively. All 16 of Liverpool's state secondaries with a designated religious character - Church of England, Roman Catholic, Jewish or a joint designation - entered pupils for GCSE Religious Studies in 2024/25, together entering 86.2% of their own combined Key Stage 4 cohort. Among Liverpool's 23 schools with no religious character, only 9 entered any pupils at all, and those 23 schools entered just 11.8% of their combined cohort between them. The one exception is Liverpool College, a Church of England academy that entered only 8.8% of its own pupils - confirmed directly at GIAS.
Only to teach it. Section 80(1)(a) of the Education Act 2002 requires every maintained school's basic curriculum to include religious education for all registered pupils, and section 69 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 places the duty to secure this on the local authority, governing body and head teacher. Academies and free schools are bound by the equivalent requirement in their own funding agreement rather than this legislation directly, per the Department for Education's own guidance. None of this requires a school to enter a single pupil for the GCSE examination itself - that is a separate curriculum choice.
No - the relationship is weak and inconsistent, not a squeeze. Across the 36 of Liverpool's 39 state-funded secondaries with usable 2024/25 figures, the correlation between a school's EBacc entry rate and its GCSE Religious Studies entry rate is a Pearson r of +0.135 - close to zero. Whether a school has a designated religious character is a far stronger predictor of entry than its EBacc rate: 16 of 16 faith schools entered pupils, against 9 of 23 non-faith schools, regardless of EBacc rate. This correlation is a Leading Tuition calculation from published Department for Education figures, not a published statistic itself.
Our specialist tutors work from a student's own school and exam board - AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas or WJEC - and from whichever route that school has entered them for, Full Course or Short Course. Sessions run one-to-one online with a shared whiteboard, building the extended-writing and evaluative-argument technique every board's Religious Studies paper rewards, using real past papers and mark schemes for the correct specification. Rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot, we help Liverpool families whether their school enters almost every pupil or only a handful.
For tutoring across other subjects and stages in the city, see our Liverpool tuition hub.
Whether your child's school is one of the 16 that enters almost its whole cohort, or one of the 23 where Religious Studies is a genuine minority choice, a tutor who understands the specification and route your school actually uses starts from a stronger position than one working from a generic scheme of work. 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.
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