Liverpool's own 2024/25 GCSE Spanish results, and why Liverpool's schools became Spanish-dominant years before England did as a whole.
Book a Free ConsultationLiverpool is a local authority in North West England where 1,726 pupils were entered for GCSE Spanish in 2024/25, achieving 63% at grade 4 or above and 49% at grade 5 or above. Spanish is Liverpool's clear leading modern language: French drew only 528 entries and German just 73 in the same year.
Whether your child's school teaches Spanish, French, German or a community language, the right preparation depends on their exact exam board and specification. Our expert GCSE Spanish tutors help students across Liverpool across AQA and Pearson Edexcel.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppFor the English Baccalaureate, a pupil must enter an approved language, and the languages pillar is far wider than Spanish alone: French, German and Spanish all count, and so do Latin and Classical Greek, and so do approved community and heritage languages such as Arabic, Polish, Urdu, Bengali, Portuguese and Mandarin. A pupil who enters French, Latin or Arabic is credited with the languages pillar and has no Spanish entry at all - the pillar entry rate is never the same figure as any single language's own entry count, and the two should never be swapped for one another. In Liverpool in 2024/25, 2,421 pupils entered the EBacc languages pillar (45.1% of the 5,366-pupil cohort), a figure built from Spanish, French, German, Latin, Classical Greek and community-language entries counted once per pupil - not the 1,726 Spanish entries alone, and not a simple sum of every language subject's own entry count, because a pupil taking two languages appears in both subjects' totals but only once in the pillar. The Department for Education separately publishes how many pupils did exactly that: 212 Liverpool pupils entered more than one modern foreign language in 2024/25 (4.0% of the cohort), a slightly higher rate than England's own 3.4%.
The genuinely striking comparison is not Spanish against the pillar, but Liverpool's languages pillar against England's. England's own languages-pillar entry rate, 45.9%, is only 0.8 percentage points above Liverpool's 45.1% - a near-parity that looks nothing like the EBacc humanities pillar, where our Liverpool GCSE History page found Liverpool trailing England by 10.8 percentage points (70.4% against 81.2%) in the same 2024/25 data. Within the pupils who did enter a language, Liverpool's cohort achieved grade 4 or above in the EBacc languages pillar 67.5% of the time and grade 5 or above 54.9% of the time, against England's 73.1% and 60.6% - gaps of 5.6 and 5.7 points, narrower than the England-Liverpool gaps on some other measures on this page. Liverpool's shortfall against England on languages sits almost entirely in results, not participation - the reverse of the pattern this batch's own GCSE History page found on humanities.
Liverpool's 2024/25 GCSE Spanish results sit behind England's state-funded average on both headline thresholds: 63% of Liverpool's entries reached grade 4 or above against 69% nationally, and 49% reached grade 5 or above against 54% nationally - gaps of 6 and 5 percentage points. French and German, though far smaller subjects locally, both matched or beat England's own results: Liverpool's French entries reached 73% at grade 4+ against England's 71%, and German reached 75% against England's 78% (roughly level, on a much smaller entry base of just 73 pupils).
| Subject / area, 2024/25 | Entries | Grade 4+ | Grade 5+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liverpool - GCSE Spanish | 1,726 | 63% | 49% |
| England (state-funded) - GCSE Spanish | 123,145 | 69% | 54% |
| Liverpool - GCSE French | 528 | 73% | 63% |
| England (state-funded) - GCSE French | 119,214 | 71% | 60% |
| Liverpool - GCSE German | 73 | 75% | 59% |
| England (state-funded) - GCSE German | 29,898 | 78% | 63% |
A short call is enough to check how your child's own results compare with these figures, and what that means for their revision - book a free consultation.
Liverpool's GCSE Spanish entries rose from 1,519 in 2022/23 to 1,803 in 2023/24 - an 18.7% jump - before falling back to 1,726 in 2024/25, a 4.3% drop. Grade 4+ achievement dipped from 66% to 60% across the first two years before recovering to 63%; grade 5+ achievement followed the same shape, from 50% down to 43% then back up to 49%. France and Germany moved differently: Liverpool's French entries stayed close to flat (529, 549, 528), while German rose across all three years, from 59 to 61 to 73 - a 23.7% rise overall, though still a tiny subject next to Spanish.
| Liverpool, by year | Spanish entries | Spanish 4+/5+ | French entries | German entries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022/23 | 1,519 | 66% / 50% | 529 | 59 |
| 2023/24 | 1,803 | 60% / 43% | 549 | 61 |
| 2024/25 | 1,726 | 63% / 49% | 528 | 73 |
The most striking finding in this series is not Liverpool's own year-on-year movement but how it compares with England's. Liverpool's Spanish entries have outnumbered its French entries in every one of these three years - by 2.9 to 1 in 2022/23, widening to 3.4 to 1 in 2023/24 and 3.3 to 1 in 2024/25. England took far longer to get there: nationally, French actually led Spanish in both 2022/23 (116,694 against 111,649) and 2023/24 (121,066 against 120,036, a margin of under 1,100 entries), and Spanish only overtook French for the first time in this series in 2024/25, by 123,145 to 119,214. Liverpool's schools reached a heavily Spanish-led pattern years before England's did as a whole, and by a far wider margin once there: Spanish makes up 74.2% of Liverpool's combined Spanish-French-German entries in 2024/25, against 45.2% of England's equivalent total - Liverpool's language teaching has consolidated around Spanish to a degree the national picture has not come close to matching.
Liverpool had 39 state-funded secondary schools with a Key Stage 4 cohort in 2024/25, the same population already established and GIAS-checked on this batch's sibling pages. Querying the Department's school-level subject-entry data fresh for Spanish, French, German and combined community languages returns 34 Liverpool schools with at least one entry across those subjects before any exclusions. Three are excluded as not part of the state-funded 39: Auckland College and Christian Fellowship School are independent schools confirmed open on Get Information about Schools, and St Vincent's School is a non-maintained special school, a distinct category from both "state-funded" and "independent."
That leaves 31 state-funded schools entering at least one language GCSE. The remaining 8 - Abbot's Lea School, Bank View High School, Childwall Abbey School, Clifford Holroyde Specialist SEN College, Palmerston School, Redbridge High School, Sandfield Park School and Woolton High School - are the same community and specialist SEN schools already identified as entering neither GCSE History nor Geography on this batch's History page; three of them do not appear anywhere in the Department's school-level exam dataset at all, consistent with cohorts who are not entered for GCSEs. Of the 31 language-entering schools, 29 entered Spanish - but two named, open schools entered none: Holly Lodge Girls' College (URN 104688) entered 108 pupils for French against just 2 for Spanish, and King David High School (URN 104703) entered 10 for French and 22 for German with no Spanish entries at all. Fifteen schools entered French and six entered German, and at every one of those schools except Holly Lodge and King David, French or German sat alongside Spanish rather than replacing it.
| Liverpool's 39 state-funded secondaries, 2024/25 | Schools |
|---|---|
| Enter at least one language GCSE | 31 |
| of which enter Spanish | 29 |
| of which enter French | 15 |
| of which enter German | 6 |
| of which enter no Spanish at all (French/German only) | 2 |
| Enter no language GCSE | 8 |
Whichever language your child's school actually teaches, a tutor working from the right specification starts from a stronger position than one working from a generic scheme of work - book a free consultation and we'll confirm your child's exact board and tier first.
Community and heritage languages are real and locally distinctive in Liverpool, though the Department for Education publishes them at city level as a single combined row rather than by individual language: "Other Modern Languages" drew 290 entries in Liverpool in 2024/25, achieving an unusually high 89% at grade 4 or above and 85% at grade 5 or above - both well above Spanish's own 63% and 49%, consistent with a GCSE frequently sat by pupils who already speak the language at home. Recombining the Department's own published school-level entries by language - summing every Liverpool school's individual entries for Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese, Turkish, Italian, Russian, Persian and Urdu, a calculation performed by Leading Tuition from the Department's own granular data rather than a single published city-wide figure - shows Arabic is by far the largest component: 102 of the 290 entries (over a third), ahead of Polish (61), Portuguese (36), Chinese (33), Turkish (21), Italian (17), Russian (9), Persian (8) and Urdu (1).
Two named, open Liverpool schools illustrate how concentrated this is. King's Leadership Academy, Liverpool (URN 137675), a 125-pupil-cohort academy, entered 20 pupils for Arabic GCSE in 2024/25 - 16.0% of its entire cohort - alongside 44 Spanish entries and no French or German at all. North Liverpool Academy (URN 131065), a 221-pupil-cohort academy, spread its community-language entries far wider: 16 pupils for Arabic, 14 for Polish, 6 for Chinese, 2 for Russian, and one each for Italian, Portuguese and Persian - 41 entries across seven different languages, 18.6% of its cohort, alongside 36 Spanish entries. Neither school enters French or German at all; both build their EBacc languages pillar participation from Spanish plus a genuinely diverse community-language offer rather than the traditional Spanish-French-German set.
| Liverpool "Other Modern Languages" entries by language, 2024/25 | Entries |
|---|---|
| Arabic | 102 |
| Polish | 61 |
| Portuguese | 36 |
| Chinese | 33 |
| Turkish | 21 |
| Italian | 17 |
| Russian | 9 |
| Persian | 8 |
| Urdu | 1 |
A child sitting a community language still needs the same exam-technique support as one sitting Spanish, French or German - our tutors work across all of them. Book a free consultation to talk through your child's actual specification.
Yes. GCSE modern languages were re-specified for first teaching from September 2024, and under the current specifications, GCSE Spanish splits into a Foundation tier (grades 1-5) and a Higher tier (grades 4-9), with students sitting all four papers at the same tier in the same exam series. Checked directly against each board's own specification: AQA's GCSE Spanish (8692) and Pearson Edexcel's GCSE (9-1) Spanish (1SP1) both split the qualification into four equally weighted papers - Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing, each worth 25% of the grade. Speaking is assessed separately from the three written papers, exactly as the brief for this batch expected: Edexcel's Paper 1 speaking assessment is internally conducted by the student's own teacher but externally marked by Pearson, built from three consecutive tasks - a read-aloud-plus-unprepared-interaction task, a role play, and a picture-description task followed by a further unprepared conversation - lasting 7-9 minutes at Foundation tier and 10-12 minutes at Higher, plus 15 minutes' preparation time. AQA's Speaking paper follows the same three-task shape (a reading-aloud card, a role play and a photo card with conversation) and the same 25% weighting.
Not every board that offers other GCSE subjects in Liverpool also offers Spanish. Eduqas's current GCSE catalogue, checked live in September 2026, includes GCSE Latin but no GCSE Spanish, French or German, and OCR does not run a GCSE in Spanish at all - so currently only AQA and Pearson Edexcel offer the reformed qualification. Eduqas's own previous GCSE Spanish (Ofqual qualification number 60189010, first teaching 2016) is now recorded as "Archived" on the government's register of regulated qualifications, with funding approval ending 17 November 2025. Because first teaching under the new AQA and Edexcel specifications began in September 2024 - a two-year Key Stage 4 course - the first exams under either reformed specification are not sat until June 2026. Every DfE result on this page, including the full 2024/25 series, was generated under the outgoing pre-2024 specifications; results for the reformed GCSE Spanish will not appear in the Department's published performance tables until a future release.
Spanish competes for a shared slot, not a dedicated one. Attainment 8 is built from four buckets filling eight GCSE-equivalent slots: English counts twice (double-weighted), maths counts twice (double-weighted), three slots go to a pupil's best results from the EBacc group of subjects, and a final three go to any other qualifications, the "open" group. Spanish does not have its own slot - it competes for the three EBacc slots alongside History, Geography and computer science, and a pupil's best result from that whole group fills those three places, whichever subjects it comes from. There is no Progress 8 measure for 2024/25 or 2025/26 - the Department has published none, and Attainment 8 and the EBacc entry and achievement rates above are the relevant published measures.
Liverpool's average score across that shared EBacc bucket was 12 in 2024/25, against 13.5 for England - a 1.5-point gap on a bucket that Spanish results feed into alongside History, Geography and computer science, smaller than the 42.1-versus-46 gap on Attainment 8 as a whole. Separately, of pupils who entered exactly four of the five EBacc components nationally in 2024/25, 88.4% were missing the languages component against just 11.3% missing humanities - a national finding, not a Liverpool-specific one, but consistent with the direction Liverpool's own data shows: participation, not results, is where the languages pillar bites hardest.
Leading Tuition's GCSE Spanish tutors work from a student's own school, exam board and tier - Foundation or Higher, on AQA or Pearson Edexcel - rather than a generic scheme of work that assumes the wrong specification. Sessions run one-to-one online with a shared whiteboard, so a tutor can work through listening, reading, writing and the three speaking tasks on the correct papers, 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 Spanish for families who need more than one. Families in Liverpool wanting a different GCSE subject can also see our GCSE English tutors in Liverpool, GCSE Maths tutors in Liverpool and GCSE History tutors in Liverpool pages, our GCSE resources for parents guide covers wider revision support, and families researching tutoring in other cities can browse every location we cover.
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Whether your child sits Spanish, French, German or a community language for GCSE, our expert GCSE Spanish tutors help students across Liverpool across AQA and Pearson Edexcel. 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, headline-measures and school-level datasets, queried directly on 2 September 2026; King's Leadership Academy, Liverpool, North Liverpool Academy, Holly Lodge Girls' College and King David High School's figures come from the same school-level dataset, cross-checked against each school's Get Information about Schools record to confirm it is open and within Liverpool, and the same source confirmed Auckland College and Christian Fellowship School are independent and St Vincent's School is non-maintained. The national "missing the languages component" figure is drawn from the same Key Stage 4 performance release's own published commentary. Specification and assessment details are confirmed directly at each awarding body: AQA's GCSE Spanish (8692) and Pearson Edexcel's GCSE (9-1) Spanish specification PDF (1SP1); Eduqas's current qualifications list and OCR's GCSE subject list were both checked live on 2 September 2026, and the Archived status of Eduqas's previous GCSE Spanish (QN 60189010) is confirmed on the government's register of regulated qualifications. Parents wanting wider GCSE support across every subject can see our GCSE resources for parents guide.
1,726 pupils were entered for GCSE Spanish in Liverpool in 2024/25, and 63% achieved grade 4 or above while 49% achieved grade 5 or above, according to the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance data for state-funded schools. Spanish is by far Liverpool's most-entered modern foreign language: French drew 528 entries in the same year and German just 73.
No. The EBacc languages pillar counts a pupil once for entering any approved language - Spanish, French, German, Latin, Classical Greek or a community language such as Arabic or Polish - so it is a different figure from any single subject's own entry count. In Liverpool, 2,421 pupils entered the EBacc languages pillar in 2024/25 (45.1% of the 5,366-pupil cohort), against 1,726 Spanish entries alone. England's own languages-pillar entry rate, 45.9%, is only 0.8 percentage points higher than Liverpool's - far closer than the 10.8-point gap on the EBacc humanities pillar (History or Geography) that our Liverpool GCSE History page found for the same year.
Liverpool's Spanish entries rose from 1,519 in 2022/23 to 1,803 in 2023/24, then fell to 1,726 in 2024/25 - but Spanish has outnumbered French in every one of these three years, by a widening margin (2.9 to 1 in 2022/23, rising to 3.3 to 1 in 2024/25). Nationally, Spanish only overtook French for the first time in this series in 2024/25 (123,145 entries against French's 119,214); France led narrowly in both 2022/23 and 2023/24. Liverpool's schools reached a Spanish-dominant pattern years before England did as a whole, and by a far wider margin.
Not all of them. Of Liverpool's 39 state-funded secondary schools with a Key Stage 4 cohort in 2024/25, 31 entered at least one pupil for Spanish, French, German or a community language; the remaining 8 - all small community or specialist SEN schools - entered none. Of the 31, 29 entered Spanish, but two named, open schools entered zero Spanish pupils at all: Holly Lodge Girls' College (108 French entries against just 2 in Spanish) and King David High School (10 French, 22 German, no Spanish). Fifteen schools entered French and six entered German, most of them alongside Spanish rather than instead of it.
Arabic, by a wide margin. The Department for Education publishes Liverpool's combined "Other Modern Languages" entries as a single row - 290 in 2024/25, achieving 89% at grade 4 or above - but recombining the same Department's own published school-level entries by language shows Arabic accounts for 102 of those 290 entries (over a third), ahead of Polish (61), Portuguese (36) and Chinese (33). King's Leadership Academy, Liverpool entered 20 pupils for Arabic in 2024/25, 16% of its 125-pupil cohort, and North Liverpool Academy entered 41 pupils for community languages across seven different languages.
Yes. Both boards currently offering GCSE Spanish for first teaching from September 2024 - AQA (specification 8692) and Pearson Edexcel (specification 1SP1) - split it into a Foundation tier (grades 1-5) and a Higher tier (grades 4-9), with all four papers (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing, each 25% of the grade) sat at the same tier. Eduqas's current GCSE catalogue does not include Spanish, French or German, and OCR does not offer a GCSE in Spanish at all. Because first teaching began in September 2024, the first exams under this specification are sat in June 2026; every DfE result published so far, including the 2024/25 figures on this page, reflects the outgoing specification.
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