DfE's own 2024/25 data across two London boroughs, checked school by school: full-cohort entry at some schools, single figures at others, and a Church of England school with the lowest entry rate of the nine we checked.
Book a Free ConsultationAt Dagenham Park CofE School, 12 of 202 pupils sat GCSE Religious Studies in 2024/25 -- 5.9%. 1.9 miles away, postcode-verified, at All Saints Catholic School, 227 of 229 did -- 99.1%. Both are in Barking and Dagenham; one is Church of England, one is Catholic. Faith status does not decide it, checked school by school across two London boroughs.
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Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppChecked directly at source rather than assumed: every maintained school in England must include religious education in what the law calls its "basic curriculum." Section 80(1)(a) of the Education Act 2002 states that the curriculum for every maintained school in England "shall comprise a basic curriculum which includes provision for religious education for all registered pupils at the school," subject to the arrangements set out in Schedule 19 to the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. That duty binds maintained schools directly. It does not, on its own wording, mention academies -- and most of the schools checked for this page are academies, not maintained schools. The Department for Education's own published guidance, "RE and collective worship in academies and free schools" (18 December 2012), closes that gap in a single sentence: "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." For an academy with a religious designation specifically, section 8B(5) of the Academies Act 2010 goes further, requiring the academy's proprietor to "ensure that religious education is provided at the Academy for all pupils who wish to receive it."
None of that is a duty to enter anyone for a GCSE. Teaching RE and entering pupils for the GCSE examination are two different obligations, and a school can fully discharge the first without a single entry in the second -- which is exactly what this page finds at one Barking and Dagenham school below. Parents also have a separate, specific right that applies only to the teaching duty, not to the GCSE: under section 71(1) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, a parent at a community, foundation or voluntary school may request that their child be wholly or partly excused from the religious education given under the school's basic curriculum, and the child "shall be so excused until the request is withdrawn." That withdrawal right sits alongside the teaching duty, is not identical to it, and has no bearing on whether a school chooses to enter pupils for the separate GCSE qualification.
London is not a local authority, so it carries no results row of its own in DfE's performance 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" -- so any figure that simply says "London" is really a named borough, a grouping of boroughs, or an England-wide average, and this page states which on every comparison. Rather than reconstruct a borough-wide average, this page checks nine named, individually verified state-funded secondary schools across two boroughs neither of Leading Tuition's other London GCSE pages has checked: our GCSE Business Studies page covers Brent and Hackney; 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 Computer Science page covers Greenwich and Lewisham; our GCSE English page covers Islington and Newham; our GCSE History page covers Havering and Waltham Forest. All nine schools here are confirmed Open on GIAS's own establishment records, checked by URN on 2 September 2026, and their entries and attainment figures come from the same DfE Compare School and College Performance exports, checked the same day.
| School (2024/25) | Borough / Type / Religious character | English Language cohort | GCSE Religious Studies entries | Full EBacc entry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stepney All Saints CE Secondary School | Tower Hamlets, Voluntary aided — Church of England | 205 | 205 (100.0%) | 79.0% |
| Bishop Challoner Catholic School | Tower Hamlets, Academy converter — Roman Catholic | 208 | 207 (99.5%) | 31.3% |
| Mulberry School for Girls | Tower Hamlets, Academy converter — does not apply | 238 | 237 (99.6%) | 88.7% |
| Bow School | Tower Hamlets, Community school — does not apply | 219 | 219 (100.0%) | 38.2% |
| Morpeth School | Tower Hamlets, Community school — does not apply | 224 | 215 (96.0%) | 57.9% |
| Dagenham Park CofE School | Barking & Dagenham, Voluntary controlled — Church of England | 202 | 12 (5.9%) | 23.7% |
| All Saints Catholic School and Technology College | Barking & Dagenham, Voluntary aided — Roman Catholic | 229 | 227 (99.1%) | 86.5% |
| Robert Clack School | Barking & Dagenham, Community school (all-through) — does not apply | 464 | 451 (97.2%) | 7.7% |
| Barking Abbey School | Barking & Dagenham, Community school — does not apply | 352 | 93 (26.4%) | 38.2% |
Nine schools, two boroughs, entry rates from 5.9% to 100%. Our expert GCSE Religious Studies tutors help students across London prepare for the exact specification their own school runs, whatever share of the cohort sits it.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppStepney All Saints Church of England Secondary School, a voluntary aided school confirmed Church of England on GIAS's own establishment record (URN 100977), entered all 205 of its 205-pupil English Language cohort for GCSE Religious Studies in 2024/25 -- full-cohort entry, at a full-EBacc rate of 79.0% against Tower Hamlets' own local-authority average of 53.7% and England's 40.5%. Bishop Challoner Catholic School, an academy converter GIAS confirms as Roman Catholic (URN 150606, successor to a closed URN following an earlier boys'/girls' amalgamation), entered 207 of 208 -- 99.5% -- despite a full-EBacc rate of just 31.3%, well below both the borough and national averages. Between a Church of England school at 79.0% EBacc entry and a Catholic school at 31.3%, Religious Studies entry sits at essentially the same near-universal level: 100.0% against 99.5%.
Three more Tower Hamlets schools with no religious character at all -- "Does not apply," GIAS-confirmed by URN for each -- sit in the same narrow band. Mulberry School for Girls (URN 143629), an academy converter historically associated with serving the borough's Bangladeshi Muslim community, entered 237 of 238 pupils (99.6%) at an 88.7% full-EBacc rate, the highest of the five schools checked here. Bow School (URN 100965), a community school, entered all 219 of 219 (100.0%) at a 38.2% full-EBacc rate. Morpeth School (URN 100967), also a community school, entered 215 of 224 (96.0%) at 57.9% full-EBacc. Across all five Tower Hamlets schools -- one Anglican, one Catholic, three with no religious designation -- Religious Studies entry never drops below 96.0%, regardless of faith status and regardless of a full-EBacc rate that itself ranges from 31.3% to 88.7%. In this borough specifically, whatever is driving near-universal Religious Studies entry, it is not religious character.
Barking and Dagenham breaks the pattern Tower Hamlets sets, and it breaks it in the direction least expected. Dagenham Park CofE School, a voluntary controlled school GIAS confirms as Church of England (URN 136028), entered just 12 of its 202-pupil English Language cohort for GCSE Religious Studies -- 5.9%, the single lowest entry rate of all nine schools checked for this page, at a school whose own name and religious designation might suggest the opposite. Its full-EBacc entry rate, 23.7%, is also the lowest on this page. All Saints Catholic School and Technology College (URN 101247), a voluntary aided school GIAS confirms as Roman Catholic, sits at the other extreme: 227 of 229 pupils entered for the GCSE -- 99.1% -- at an 86.5% full-EBacc rate, the highest of the four Barking and Dagenham schools checked. Two faith schools of different denominations, in the same borough, produce entry rates 93 percentage points apart.
The borough's two community schools with no religious character split just as sharply, and one sits closer to the Catholic school than to its fellow community school. Robert Clack School (URN 101245), an all-through community school and the largest cohort checked for this page at 464 pupils, entered 451 for Religious Studies -- 97.2%, despite a full-EBacc entry rate of only 7.7%, the single lowest of all nine schools here. Its own postcode sits just 0.11 miles from All Saints Catholic School's -- effectively the same street -- yet one runs an 86.5% full-EBacc rate against the other's 7.7%, with near-identical Religious Studies entry either side. Barking Abbey School (URN 101241), a community school 2.6 miles from Robert Clack by postcode, entered just 93 -- 26.4% -- at a 38.2% full-EBacc rate, identical to Bow School's EBacc figure in Tower Hamlets despite a Religious Studies entry rate more than 70 points lower. Barking and Dagenham's own local-authority average full-EBacc entry rate for 2024/25 is 40.5%, identical to one decimal place to England's own state-funded average of 40.5% -- a genuine coincidence in this year's published figures, not a pattern this page draws any conclusion from. Across all four Barking and Dagenham schools, religious character predicts nothing: the CofE school has the lowest Religious Studies entry rate on this page, the Catholic school has one of the highest, and the two schools with no religious character at all split between them.
Whether your child's school enters almost everyone for GCSE Religious Studies or a small minority, our expert GCSE Religious Studies tutors help students across London build the extended-writing and evaluation skills these papers reward, on whichever board their school runs.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppNot on the nine schools checked for this page -- and this page tested that relationship rather than assumed it. GCSE Religious Studies is not an EBacc subject: the EBacc's humanities pillar is satisfied by history or geography, not Religious Studies, so RS competes for space in a school's optional blocks alongside everything else that is not core or EBacc. Computed directly on the nine (full-EBacc %, Religious Studies entry %) pairs sourced individually above, the relationship across Tower Hamlets and Barking and Dagenham is weakly positive: Pearson r = +0.40 (n = 9). That is not strong enough, on nine schools, to support any claim about direction, and the single clearest data point runs directly against an EBacc-squeeze story: Robert Clack School posts the second-lowest full-EBacc entry rate on this page, 7.7%, alongside one of the highest Religious Studies entry rates, 97.2%. Bishop Challoner Catholic School shows the same pattern from the opposite side: a 31.3% full-EBacc rate sits alongside a 99.5% Religious Studies entry rate. With only nine schools, a confound cannot be ruled out -- schools differing in overall curriculum breadth and staffing, not specifically in an EBacc-versus-RS trade-off, could produce the same numbers -- and this page does not claim to have identified a causal mechanism. Sibling Leading Tuition pages testing the identical relationship in other cities this batch report the same absence of a consistent direction.
It is also worth being precise about what is changing in how these figures get reported. DfE's own Government response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, published 5 November 2025, states that the Department will "remove EBacc headline and additional measures at key stage 4," taking effect "for the key stage 4 performance measures for the 2025 to 2026 academic year to be published in autumn 2026." Every EBacc figure on this page is the 2024/25 measure -- the most recent year actually published at the time of writing -- and none of them is described as an ongoing or current series.
GCSE Religious Studies exists in two sizes that DfE and Ofqual do not treat as interchangeable, and this subject carries more live specifications per board than most GCSEs. AQA alone offers three, each checked directly against its own specification PDF and confirmed live on Ofqual's register on 2 September 2026: Religious Studies A (code 8062, Ofqual qualification number 601/8400/0), Religious Studies B (code 8063, QN 601/8401/2), and a separate Short Course (code 8061, QN 601/8399/8) worth half the guided learning hours of either full course and not eligible for GCSE-size equivalence in DfE's own accountability measures. AQA's own specification states plainly that "there are no overlaps with any other AQA qualifications at this level" -- Spec A and Spec B are genuinely separate qualifications, not two editions of one code, each currently at Version 1.3 with a 1 September 2025 update.
The other three current boards each offer exactly one full-course specification, checked directly against Ofqual's live register: Cambridge OCR's Religious Studies (code J625, QN 601/8594/6), assessed across two components covering two full religions plus a third studied from a philosophy-and-ethics perspective, newly reissued as Version 2.0 in July 2026 under the board's new "Cambridge OCR" name; and WJEC Eduqas's Religious Studies (qualification code C120QS, QN 601/8879/0). Both also offer a genuine short course: OCR's (QN 601/8712/8, a single paper, code J125/01) and Eduqas's (code C125QT, QN 601/8880/7). Pearson Edexcel is the one board of the four without any short course at all on Ofqual's current register -- checked directly, its two live GCSEs are Religious Studies A, "Faith and Practice in the 21st Century" (code 1RA0, QN 603/0079/6), and Religious Studies B, "Beliefs in Action" (code 1RB0, QN 603/0063/2), both full course only. DfE's own per-school entries data, as published through Compare School and College Performance, is silent on this exact distinction: every one of the nine schools' own "Subjects entered at key stage 4" tables checked for this page carries a single "Religious Studies" row with qualification type recorded only as "GCSE" -- checked against the full table at every school, where "GCSE" and "Technical Award" are the only two qualification-type values that appear anywhere, for any subject. Nothing in that column distinguishes a full course from a short course. This page cannot say from DfE's own school-level data alone whether any of the entries totalled above include short-course pupils, or whether a school running the full course also enters a handful separately for the short course; the absence of a distinct short-course row is not proof that no pupil sits one, since DfE suppresses small cohorts in this same data. What each of these nine schools actually teaches, board and route, would need to be confirmed with the school directly.
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Whichever specification and route your child's school actually runs, our expert GCSE Religious Studies tutors help students across London build genuine source-based argument and evaluation skills, across AQA, Pearson Edexcel, Cambridge OCR and WJEC Eduqas.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppLondon has 32 boroughs plus the City of London, and no single page can check every secondary school in all of them. This page covers Tower Hamlets and Barking and Dagenham -- two boroughs none of Leading Tuition's other GCSE location pages for London has already checked (Brent, Hackney, Sutton, Ealing, Redbridge, Barnet, Bromley, Croydon, Harrow, Islington, Kingston upon Thames, Richmond upon Thames, Enfield, Bexley, Havering, Waltham Forest, Newham, Greenwich and Lewisham are covered by sibling pages). It is not a claim to have checked every secondary school within these two boroughs -- nine named schools, not an exhaustive borough census.
No, and this is the single most confused point on the subject. Every maintained school in England must provide religious education to all registered pupils as part of its statutory basic curriculum, under section 80(1)(a) of the Education Act 2002. That is a duty to teach RE, not a duty to enter anyone for a GCSE in it. A school can discharge the RE duty entirely through non-examined lessons and still enter a single-figure share of its cohort for the GCSE, or none at all -- Dagenham Park CofE School, checked for this page, teaches RE to its whole school but entered only 12 of 202 pupils (5.9%) for the GCSE in 2024/25.
Not reliably, on the nine schools checked for this page. In Tower Hamlets, the Church of England school (Stepney All Saints, 100.0% entry) and the Catholic school (Bishop Challoner Catholic School, 99.5%) sit alongside three schools with no religious character at all (96.0% to 100.0%) -- faith status makes almost no visible difference. In Barking and Dagenham, the pattern breaks in the opposite direction: the borough's Catholic school (All Saints Catholic School and Technology College) enters 99.1%, but its Church of England school (Dagenham Park) enters only 5.9% -- the lowest of all nine schools checked, faith or otherwise. Religious character, checked directly against GIAS by URN, does not predict entry in either borough.
No, checked directly against GIAS's own religious character filter for both boroughs on 2 September 2026. Tower Hamlets and Barking and Dagenham each return zero state-funded secondary schools recorded with Muslim, Islam, Jewish, Orthodox Jewish or Charedi Jewish religious character. Tower Hamlets has a large Muslim population and a school, Mulberry School for Girls, historically associated with serving it -- but Mulberry's own GIAS establishment record lists its religious character as "Does not apply": it is a community-heritage academy, not a faith school, and its 99.6% Religious Studies entry rate sits alongside three other non-faith schools in the same borough at 96.0% to 100.0%.
Not on the nine schools checked for this page, and not consistently across sibling Leading Tuition pages that have checked the same relationship in other cities this batch, which report no consistent direction either. Computed directly on this page's nine (full-EBacc %, Religious Studies entry %) pairs, the relationship is weakly positive (Pearson r = +0.40, n = 9) -- and the clearest single data point runs opposite to an EBacc-squeeze story: Robert Clack School posts a 7.7% full-EBacc entry rate, one of the lowest on this page, alongside a 97.2% Religious Studies entry rate, one of the highest. With nine schools, a school-capacity confound cannot be ruled out, and this page does not claim to have identified a causal mechanism.
Our expert GCSE Religious Studies tutors work across AQA, Pearson Edexcel, Cambridge OCR and WJEC Eduqas, on whichever specification and route -- full course or short course -- a child's school actually runs, building the source-based argument, evaluation and extended-writing skills each board's papers reward. Sessions are built around the specific religions, themes and paper structure for the exact specification a pupil is sitting, whether their school enters almost everyone for the GCSE or a small minority. Book a free consultation and we will confirm the board, specification and route first, then build a programme around it.
Entries and full-EBacc figures on this page are drawn from DfE's Compare School and College Performance service, checked 2 September 2026. The religious-education statutory duty is drawn directly from the Education Act 2002, the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 and the Academies Act 2010. Exam board specifications and Ofqual qualification numbers are drawn from each board's own specification and Ofqual's Find a regulated qualification register. School identity and religious character are drawn from GIAS's own establishment records. Families researching Leading Tuition's closest subject page, our GCSE History tuition service, our GCSE Business Studies tutors in London page, our GCSE Biology tutors in London page, our GCSE Computer Science tutors in London page, our wider GCSE tuition service, and our wider tutoring locations across the UK, can find each covered on its own page.
Still working out whether your child's school runs the full course, the short course, or one exam board over another? Our expert GCSE Religious Studies tutors help students across London confirm it first, then teach to the exact papers your child will actually sit.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppOur expert GCSE Religious Studies tutors help students across London across AQA, Pearson Edexcel, Cambridge OCR and WJEC Eduqas, whichever specification and route in the capital your child's school actually runs -- near-universal entry, a small minority, or somewhere in between.
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