GCSE History Tutors in London

GCSE History is one of only two subjects -- alongside Geography -- that can satisfy the EBacc humanities pillar, so at every school the two compete for the same pupils. Nationally, GCSE History's provisional entries reached 295,095 in summer 2026 against Geography's 289,615, a gap of just 5,480 -- far narrower than History's 24,810-entry lead at its 2024 peak. Our expert GCSE History tutors help students across London across AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas.

History or Geography: which one actually counts for a school's EBacc humanities pillar?

The English Baccalaureate has five pillars -- English, maths, science, a language, and history or geography -- and DfE Compare's own entry guidance is explicit about the last one: "A pupil is considered to have entered for the English Baccalaureate if they entered for qualifications in English, maths, sciences, a language and either history or geography." A pupil who sits History counts. A pupil who sits Geography counts. A pupil who sits both still counts once, and for the separate EBacc Average Point Score measure, DfE's methodology is equally explicit that a pupil taking both subjects is scored on "the better result from either geography or history," not an average or a sum of the two.

This has a direct consequence for how the numbers on this page work, and it is worth stating before a single school appears: a school's Humanities pillar entry percentage is never the same figure as its raw GCSE History entry count, and its History entries plus its Geography entries can legitimately exceed its Humanities pillar entries, because a dual-entered pupil is one Humanities entry but two subject entries. Every figure below labels which of the two it is -- a subject entry count from a school's own "Subjects entered at key stage 4" table, or a Humanities pillar percentage from that same school's "EBacc additional measures" page -- and none is derived from the other.

EBacc entry and EBacc achievement are different measures again. Entry asks whether a pupil sat the qualifications; achievement asks whether they reached a grade threshold once entered. This page is about entries -- who a school puts in for History and Geography, and in what numbers -- not about grades, and every figure quoted is explicitly an entries figure for that reason.

The national numbers: a five-year seesaw between History and Geography

DfE's provisional entries release -- schools and colleges' submissions to exam boards by 15 April each year -- shows History and Geography trading places rather than one steadily overtaking the other. In summer 2022, Geography actually led: 279,205 entries against History's 278,750, a 455-entry gap in Geography's favour. History then pulled ahead for four straight years, reaching a peak lead of 24,810 entries in summer 2024 (312,410 against 287,600). That lead has since collapsed: down to 1,955 entries in summer 2025, recovering only slightly to 5,480 in summer 2026 (295,095 against 289,615, History entries up 0.4% year on year while Geography's fell 0.8%).

A-level tells a smaller-scale version of the same story. A-level History entries ran 42,885, 44,545, 43,405 and 40,940 across 2022 to 2025 before recovering 5.4% to 43,150 in 2026. A-level Geography, at 31,395 in 2025 and 31,370 in 2026, sits well below History at this stage -- a different relationship from GCSE, where the two subjects have spent most of the last five years within a few percentage points of each other.

Why doesn't London have one GCSE History figure the way a single school does?

London is not a local authority, so it carries no results row of its own in DfE's tables. London Councils, the umbrella body for London local government, describes itself as "the collective of London local government, the 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation" -- and the City of London has no state-funded secondary school of its own. Any figure that simply says "London" is really a named borough, a grouping of boroughs, or an England-wide average, and every figure on this page states which.

Rather than reconstruct a borough-wide average from all of London's schools, this page checks nine named, individually verified state-funded secondary schools across two boroughs: Havering and Waltham Forest. Neither is a borough Leading Tuition's other London GCSE pages have already checked: our GCSE Chemistry page covers Sutton, Ealing and Redbridge; our GCSE Biology page covers Barnet, Bromley, Croydon, Harrow, Islington, Kingston upon Thames and Richmond upon Thames; our GCSE Physics page covers Enfield and Bexley; our GCSE English page covers Islington and Newham. All nine schools here are confirmed open and state-funded on GIAS's own establishment records, and their entries figures come from the same DfE Compare School and College Performance exports, checked 2 September 2026. None of the nine carries a Selective admissions policy at GIAS -- unlike the grammar schools this page's sibling pages found in Bexley and Enfield, every school-to-school difference below happens without an admissions-policy explanation available.

Borough-level context sits alongside these nine schools rather than replacing them. Havering's own published Humanities pillar entry rate is 87.9% and its full EBacc entry rate is 60.1%, both against a 3,039-pupil KS4 cohort; Waltham Forest's are 77.9% and 43.4%, against 2,995 pupils. England's state-funded comparator, the same population throughout, is 81.2% for Humanities and 40.5% for full EBacc entry, across 625,647 pupils. Havering sits above England on both measures; Waltham Forest sits below England on both -- yet inside Waltham Forest, Highams Park's 85.5% Humanities entry rate clears England's 81.2%, while Lammas's 61.6% falls nearly 20 points short. A borough average predicts neither school correctly.

Lammas School ties exactly; Leytonstone doesn't come close

Lammas School, a non-selective mixed school in Waltham Forest, entered exactly 42 pupils for GCSE History and exactly 42 for GCSE Geography in 2024/25 -- the only exact tie among the nine schools checked for this page. Its Humanities pillar entry rate, 61.6%, is the lowest of the nine, against a 125-pupil KS4 cohort -- meaning well over a third of its Year 11 sat neither subject at all, not merely split evenly between the two that most pupils did sit.

Leytonstone School, a little over two miles from Lammas and also non-selective and mixed, shows the opposite pattern: 111 History entries against 55 for Geography, more than double, out of a 204-pupil cohort. Its Humanities pillar entry rate, 75.0%, actually sits higher than Lammas's -- so Leytonstone enters a larger share of its pupils for a humanity overall, and then splits that larger group far more unevenly between the two subjects than Lammas does with its smaller one.

Coopers' Company and Coborn School, in Havering, breaks the pattern a different way: 106 Geography entries against 80 for History, Geography running roughly a third ahead -- one of only two schools checked for this page where Geography, not History, is the larger of the two. Three schools, two boroughs, three completely different relationships between the same two subjects, and not one of the three differences traces to admissions policy: all three are non-selective.

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When "Humanities entry" and "full EBacc entry" tell completely different stories

Leytonstone School's own numbers show why the two measures can't be swapped for each other. Its Humanities pillar entry rate is 75.0% -- above Waltham Forest's own 77.9% average is close, and not far off England's 81.2%. But its full EBacc entry rate, the share of pupils entered for all five pillars together, is only 14.2%, far below Waltham Forest's 43.4% and England's 40.5%. The gap is not in History or Geography at all: Leytonstone's Languages pillar entry rate is 20.1%, against a Waltham Forest average of 50.8% and an England state-funded average of 45.9% -- less than half the national rate. A school can push History and Geography hard and still return a low overall EBacc figure, if a different pillar is the constraint.

This is not a one-school quirk. DfE's own national breakdown of pupils who entered exactly four of the five EBacc pillars in 2024/25 -- 85.6% of the state-funded cohort entered four or more -- found that 88.4% of that group were missing the languages component, against just 11.3% missing humanities. Nationally, languages is by far the more common gap; Leytonstone's own Languages-versus-Humanities split (20.1% against 75.0%) sits in exactly the direction that national pattern predicts, at a much more extreme scale.

The 40% British history rule every GCSE board must follow

GCSE History carries a content rule that applies across all four boards, set out in DfE's own subject content document: "British history must form a minimum of 40% of the assessed content over the full course." That is a regulatory floor, not a fixed share -- a school's actual British-history content can run higher, and this page does not claim any school teaches exactly 40%. The same document requires every specification to cover three time-scales (a short depth study, a medium period study and a long thematic study) across three geographical contexts (a UK locality, British history, and European or wider-world history).

Unlike GCSE Maths or the three separate sciences, GCSE History carries no Foundation/Higher tier split at any of the four boards -- every pupil sits the same tier of entry, so there is no tier-choice question for a GCSE History tutor to help a family navigate the way there is for maths or the sciences. What does vary by board and by school is option choice: the specific periods and depth studies on offer (Nazi Germany, Elizabethan England, Medicine Through Time, the American West, and dozens more across the four boards) differ widely, and which options a given school actually teaches is usually published on the school's own site rather than by DfE -- this page states a school's options only where the school's own site confirms them, and says so plainly where it does not check.

Which exam board does a London school use for GCSE History?

DfE's published performance data does not record which exam board an individual school uses for GCSE History, so this varies school by school and none of the nine schools on this page is attributed to a specific board here. Checked directly against each board's own qualification pages and documents: AQA GCSE History runs under specification code 8145; Pearson Edexcel GCSE History under 1HI0 (confirmed inside the specification PDF's own text rather than the board's HTML overview page, which does not display the code); OCR runs two separate GCSE History specifications -- History A (Explaining the Modern World) under J410 and History B (Schools History Project) under J411; and WJEC Eduqas GCSE History carries the Qual Code C100QS on Eduqas's own qualification page. Our expert GCSE History tutors help students across London across all four boards, confirming a student's own board and option list before building a programme rather than assuming one from their school's postcode.

Entries and pillar-percentage figures on this page are drawn from DfE's Compare School and College Performance service, checked 2 September 2026. National entries figures are drawn from the Provisional entries for GCSE, AS and A level: summer 2026 exam series release. School admissions policies are drawn from GIAS's own establishment records. Families researching Leading Tuition's wider GCSE English tutors in London page, our GCSE Biology tutors in London page, our GCSE History tuition and GCSE Geography tuition services, and our wider tutoring locations across the UK, can find each covered on its own page.

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