GCSE Economics Tutors in Manchester

GCSE Economics is a nationally small-entry qualification, and Manchester’s state sector does not enter it at all: none of the city’s 30 state-funded secondary schools entered a pupil for it in the 2025 results. Only one Manchester secondary teaches it – St Bede’s College, an independent school, entering 10 of its 106 GCSE pupils (9.4%). This page sets out who was checked, what was found, and where else a Manchester student can study Economics at A-level instead.

Does any Manchester secondary school teach GCSE Economics?

Manchester’s 30 mainstream state-funded secondary schools were checked individually at DfE’s Compare School and College Performance service – the same source and the same 30-school set Leading Tuition’s sibling page on GCSE Business Studies in the city uses. Not one of them enters a pupil for GCSE Economics: every school’s own ‘Subjects entered at key stage 4’ page was read in full, and no ‘Economics’ row appears on any of the 30 tables.

That absence could, in principle, be DfE suppressing a small cohort rather than recording a genuine zero – the department withholds some school-level figures to protect pupil privacy. This page tested that directly on Manchester’s own data rather than assuming it either way. William Hulme’s Grammar School, one of the 30, shows three GCSE subjects entered by exactly one pupil each – Modern Greek, Persian and Urdu – each displayed as an ordinary row reading ‘Total number of entries: 1’, with no suppression marker anywhere on the page. A table that records a single pupil openly is not hiding a handful of Economics entries elsewhere: an absent row on this table is a recorded zero, not a hidden one-to-five.

That is a genuinely different shape from GCSE Business Studies, which is a mainstream option across the same 30 schools: 15 of them enter it, 842 pupils between them, independently re-derived by this page’s own research from the same 30 schools’ own DfE pages, and matching the figure already published on Leading Tuition’s GCSE Business Studies page for Manchester. Economics and Business Studies sit in the same broad subject family and compete for the same optional timetable space, but only one of them survived contact with Manchester’s state secondaries in any numbers at all.

What does the school-by-school check show?

Five schools are named individually below, because each was checked and each has something specific to show – either the one real entry or a genuine, tested absence. The remaining schools checked for this page, state-funded and independent alike, carried no Economics row at all.

*Manchester Islamic Grammar School for Girls, Kassim Darwish Grammar School for Boys and Abbey College Manchester. Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, each named school’s own ‘Subjects entered at key stage 4’ page, retrieved in September 2026, fetched directly with a browser user agent and each school’s URN confirmed present in the response. Entry rate is Leading Tuition’s own calculation, not a DfE-published field.

Which Manchester school actually enters GCSE Economics?

Seven further Manchester schools were checked beyond the 30 state secondaries: the independent schools recorded in DfE’s own Manchester (local authority 352) download with a GCSE-level pupil cohort. Independent schools do appear in this data – a common assumption is that they do not, and it is wrong. Of the seven, six show the same absence as the state sector, three of them named in the table above; Manchester Islamic Grammar School for Girls, Kassim Darwish Grammar School for Boys and Abbey College Manchester were checked the same way and carry no Economics row either.

The seventh is St Bede’s College, in Alexandra Park. Its own subjects-entered page lists ‘Economics | GCSE | Total number of entries: 10’ – ten of its 106 GCSE pupils, 9.4%. DfE’s own qualification field for this row reads plainly ‘GCSE’, not an International GCSE, so on the department’s own record this is the domestic qualification rather than Pearson’s separate International GCSE in the subject – though this page could not confirm from the school’s own website which of the two boards that publish a domestic GCSE in Economics set the exam. The same school enters more than three times as many pupils for GCSE Business Studies – 33 – which shows that Economics is a genuine minority choice even at the one of the 37 checked schools where a pupil can choose it at all.

St Bede’s College is recorded Open at GIAS, with a selective admissions policy, as an independent secondary school in Manchester local authority 352, checked in September 2026. Combining every school checked for this page – the 30 state secondaries (6,633 pupils) and the seven independents (632 pupils), 7,265 pupils in total – GCSE Economics entries come to 10, all at this one school: 0.14% of the combined cohort. That is Leading Tuition’s own calculation, not a DfE-published figure, and it describes only the 37 schools actually checked for this page, not Manchester’s full secondary-age population.

Which schools were checked and found to enter none?

The Manchester Grammar School is the city’s best-known academically selective boys’ school, and Economics is exactly the kind of subject a reader might expect it to run. Its own subjects-entered table runs straight from Drama & Theatre Studies (45 entries) to Electronics (62), then English Language (208) – no Economics row between them, where the subject would sit alphabetically.

Manchester High School for Girls and Withington Girls’ School, two of the city’s other well-known independent day schools, show the same pattern. Manchester High School for Girls’ table runs from Drama & Theatre Studies (36) straight to English Language (114); Withington Girls’ School’s runs from Drama & Theatre Studies (7) to French (27). Neither carries an Economics row.

This matters for a specific reason. DfE suppresses some small school-level figures, so an absent row is not automatically a genuine zero on every DfE table. This page tested that on Manchester’s own data rather than assuming it either way – see the single-pupil rows at William Hulme’s Grammar School described above – so these three schools’ absence is read as a recorded zero, not a hidden one or two pupils DfE declined to publish.

If your school doesn’t teach GCSE Economics, what about A-level?

A Manchester family whose child’s school does not teach GCSE Economics is not locked out of the subject at sixth form. Two Manchester sixth-form colleges publish A-level Economics courses with their own entry requirements. Xaverian College, in Rusholme, states its Economics entry requirement as ‘Grade 5 in English Language and Grade 6 in Mathematics’, on a two-year, full-time course assessed by three final exams. Loreto Sixth Form College, in Chorlton, sets a general entry standard of six GCSEs at grade 9-4 with two at grade 6 or above from English, Maths or Science, and a course-specific requirement of ‘GCSE Maths grade 9-5, WITH GCSE English grade 9-4’; the same page’s own FAQ states the Maths threshold slightly differently, as ‘at least a Grade 5’ – both figures are quoted here as published, rather than silently reconciled, since the college’s own page is not fully consistent between its entry-requirements box and its FAQ.

Loreto’s FAQ answers a second question directly, in its own words: ‘Very few students have studied Economics at GCSE before starting the A-Level course. There is no requirement to have studied it before.’ That is a local, Manchester-specific confirmation of what the exam boards’ own A-level Economics specifications say nationally – see Leading Tuition’s GCSE Economics page for the full board-by-board detail – and it means a Manchester student whose school never offered the GCSE has not missed a prerequisite by starting the A-level without it.

For a Manchester family, the practical takeaway is to check which route – the GCSE at St Bede’s College, an A-level place at Xaverian or Loreto, or neither for now – actually fits a particular child, rather than assume from a city where the subject barely features at key stage 4. Leading Tuition’s national GCSE Economics page covers the AQA and OCR specifications, national entry figures and the A-level prerequisite question in full; this page focuses on what those national resources cannot show – which Manchester schools actually teach it. Our tutors also support students across other subjects in the city, including our GCSE Maths tutors in Manchester, our GCSE English tutors in Manchester, our GCSE Business Studies tutors in Manchester, and our overview of tutoring across every city we cover.

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