GCSE Religious Studies Tutors in Manchester

In the 2025 GCSE results, 29 of Manchester's 30 state-funded secondary schools entered pupils for GCSE Religious Studies – 3,037 pupils in total, 45.8% of their combined 6,633-pupil cohort – while entry rates ranged from 100% at one community school to zero at another. Every maintained school in England has a legal duty to teach religious education; entering pupils for the GCSE is a separate decision each school makes on its own.

Which of Manchester's 30 state secondaries teach GCSE Religious Studies?

Every maintained school in England must provide religious education to all registered pupils as part of its basic curriculum – but teaching RE and entering pupils for the GCSE are different things, and a school can fully discharge that duty without a single GCSE entry. To find out which Manchester schools actually enter pupils for the qualification, this page reads the 'Subjects entered at key stage 4' page for all 30 of Manchester's mainstream state-funded secondary schools with a 2025 Year 11 cohort, individually, at DfE's Compare School and College Performance service – not a sample, the complete set. The school set was verified at GIAS by URN: all 30 are confirmed Open, Secondary or All-through phase, state-funded. Two further state-funded schools, Co-op Academy Belle Vue and Dixons Newall Green Academy, were excluded because GIAS shows both opened too recently – 1 September 2021 and 1 September 2023 respectively – to have reached a Year 11 cohort by 2025.

Twenty-nine of the 30 schools entered at least one pupil for GCSE Religious Studies in the 2025 results, and one – Dixons Brooklands Academy – entered none at all, despite offering 27 other subjects and qualifications that year. Across all 30 schools combined, 3,037 pupils sat GCSE Religious Studies out of a shared cohort of 6,633 – 45.8% – but that citywide average conceals enormous variation: one school entered its entire Year 11 cohort, and several entered fewer than one pupil in ten.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, each named school's own 'Subjects entered at key stage 4' page and 'Additional entry and achievement measures' page, retrieved 2 September 2026, fetched directly with a browser user agent and each school's URN confirmed present in the response. Religious character and establishment type are from Get Information about Schools (GIAS), by URN, retrieved 2 September 2026 – never inferred from a school's name. All 30 of Manchester's mainstream state-funded secondaries with a 2025 KS4 cohort were checked individually – not a sample. Entry rate is entries divided by the school's own KS4 pupil cohort, Leading Tuition's own calculation, not a DfE-published field.

Abraham Moss Community School entered every one of its 259 pupils – the only Manchester school at exactly 100% – despite carrying no religious designation at GIAS at all ('Does not apply'). Levenshulme High School (99.0%) and Whalley Range 11-18 High School (96.9%) are also secular community-type academies with near-universal entry, so a high Religious Studies entry rate in Manchester is not confined to schools with a religious character. At the other end, Manchester Enterprise Academy entered just 2 of its 225 pupils (0.9%), the lowest nonzero rate in the city, and Dixons Brooklands Academy entered none.

Does the law actually require a Manchester school to enter pupils for GCSE Religious Studies?

No – and this distinction explains why entry varies so much. 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'. That duty binds community, foundation and voluntary schools directly, in the same section of the same Act that sets out the National Curriculum itself – RE is part of the legally required 'basic curriculum', not an optional extra. Nothing in that duty, or anywhere else in English law, requires a school to enter a single pupil for the GCSE; Dixons Brooklands Academy shows that a Manchester school can discharge the teaching duty in full and still enter nobody for the exam.

Most of Manchester's 30 schools are academies, not maintained schools, and Section 80 does not bind them the same way: the Academies Act 2010 defines an 'Academy school' only by reference to Section 78 of the Education Act 2002 (a 'balanced and broadly based curriculum'), not Section 80's specific religious education requirement. The Department for Education's own guidance is explicit about the gap this leaves, and how it is closed: '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.' In other words, a Manchester academy's duty to teach RE sits in the contractual terms of its own funding agreement with the Secretary of State, not in a standing requirement of the Academies Act itself – a real legal distinction, even though the practical effect for a pupil is the same.

A third, separate right sits alongside both duties. Under Section 71(1) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, 'if the parent of a pupil at a community, foundation or voluntary school in England requests that he may be wholly or partly excused from receiving religious education given at the school in accordance with the school's basic curriculum, the pupil shall be so excused until the request is withdrawn'. That withdrawal right belongs to the parent, not the school, and it is a different thing again from either the teaching duty or the exam-entry decision – a school can teach RE to every pupil, honour a parent's withdrawal request for one of them, and still enter only a fraction of the rest for the GCSE.

Full course or short course: which GCSE Religious Studies are Manchester schools entering?

GCSE Religious Studies exists in two forms, and DfE does not treat them identically in its own data. The full course – AQA's Religious Studies A (8062) and B (8063), OCR's J625, Pearson Edexcel's Religious Studies A (1RA0) and B (1RB0), and WJEC Eduqas's C120 – counts as one full GCSE. The short course – AQA's 8061, OCR's J125, and WJEC Eduqas's C125 – covers half the content and is worth half a GCSE. Not every board still offers one: AQA's, OCR's and Eduqas's short courses all remain live, current specifications, but Pearson Edexcel's own short course (Religious Studies B) has been withdrawn, with summer 2022 its final assessment series – Pearson's own website states plainly that 'the GCSE Short course in Religious Studies has been withdrawn now'.

DfE's own published data, at both the national and school level, gives no reliable way to tell full course from short course apart, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Compare School and College Performance's 'Subjects entered at key stage 4' page, for every one of Manchester's 30 schools, records the qualification type as a single, bare 'GCSE' – never 'full course' or 'short course' as a distinct label, and the same is true of DfE's wider published entries data for the subject. Separately, DfE's 2025 key stage 4 discount-codes workbook – the list of qualifications approved to count in that year's performance tables – includes only full-course Religious Studies qualification numbers, two AQA, two Pearson Edexcel, one OCR and one WJEC Eduqas, with no short-course entry from any board. Combined with the subjects-entered page's own statement that it 'only includes qualifications approved for inclusion in the performance measures', that is this page's best reading of what the published entries represent. But it is a reading, drawn from a separate document, not something DfE states for any individual entry – this page cannot show a single verified full-course entry, only the absence of any short-course label anywhere in the data it could access.

This matters for reading the table above correctly: this page cannot confirm that any school's Religious Studies figure is full-course only, and it cannot rule out that some pupils, at some schools, also sit the short course, because DfE's published data does not carry a field that distinguishes the two at all. Dixons Brooklands Academy's own 'Subjects entered at key stage 4' page lists 27 other subjects and qualifications for its 2025 cohort, none of them any form of Religious Studies under either name – so at minimum, this page can say that school entered nobody under the 'Religious Studies' label in any form DfE's data could show.

Which exam board sets a Manchester student's GCSE Religious Studies course?

All four GCSE boards current in England offer a full course in Religious Studies, confirmed directly on each awarding body's own live specification pages. AQA runs two parallel specifications, Religious Studies A (8062) and Religious Studies B (8063), each at Version 1.3 (1 September 2025), for teaching from September 2016 and first exams in 2018. Pearson Edexcel likewise runs two, Religious Studies A (1RA0) and Religious Studies B (1RB0), both at Specification Issue 2 (January 2024), the same first-teaching and first-assessment dates. OCR – which rebranded to Cambridge OCR from September 2025 – offers one, J625, at Version 2.0 (July 2026). WJEC Eduqas offers one, C120, at Version 4 (September 2025), teaching from 2016 and award from 2018. DfE's published school-level data does not record which of the four boards, or which specification, a given Manchester school actually uses, only that a pupil was entered for the subject.

The papers are not uniform in length, count or marks across boards, even though every board runs a two-year linear qualification with no coursework. AQA's Religious Studies A is two papers of 1 hour 45 minutes each, 96 marks plus 6 for spelling, punctuation and grammar, 50% apiece – 3 hours 30 minutes and 204 marks in total. Pearson Edexcel's Religious Studies A is three papers – a 1 hour 45 minute paper worth 50% (102 marks), then two shorter 50-minute papers worth 25% each (51 marks apiece) – 3 hours 25 minutes and 204 marks in total, matching AQA's overall marks despite a completely different paper structure. OCR's J625 is heavier again: two 1-hour papers (63 marks, 25% each) plus one 2-hour paper (126 marks, 50%) – 4 hours and 252 marks in total, the same overall marks as WJEC Eduqas's Route A (a 2-hour, a 1-hour and a 1-hour paper across three components).

Eduqas is also the only one of the four boards this page could verify offering a named alternative route built around a single faith: its Route B replaces the standard themes with 'Foundational Catholic Theology' and 'Applied Catholic Theology' components, sat alongside a compulsory Study of a World Faith paper on Judaism. DfE's data cannot say which of Manchester's six Roman Catholic schools, if any, uses Eduqas Route B rather than a standard AQA, Edexcel or OCR full course – only that each enters pupils under the single 'Religious Studies' label DfE publishes.

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Do Manchester's faith schools enter Religious Studies differently from community schools?

Yes, and the gap is the largest, cleanest local contrast this page found. GIAS records a religious character, taken by URN rather than assumed from a school's name, for 12 of Manchester's 30 state secondaries: six Roman Catholic schools (Loreto High School Chorlton, Our Lady's RC High School, Saint Paul's Catholic High School, St Matthew's RC High School, St Peter's RC High School and The Barlow RC High School), one Church of England school (Trinity CofE High School), two Muslim free schools (Eden Boys' Leadership Academy and Eden Girls' Leadership Academy), one Jewish school (The King David High School), and two academies GIAS records simply as 'Christian' (Manchester Academy and William Hulme's Grammar School – the latter despite its 'Grammar School' name being, per DfE's own admissions-policy field, non-selective). The other 18 schools carry no religious designation at GIAS at all ('Does not apply' or 'None').

Source: religious character from Get Information about Schools (GIAS), by URN, retrieved 2 September 2026. GCSE Religious Studies entry rate as in the table above. EBacc entry rate from each school's own page on Compare School and College Performance, 2024/25 measure, retrieved 2 September 2026.

The 12 faith-designated schools enter an average of 87.4% of their pupils for GCSE Religious Studies; the 18 non-faith schools average 25.7% – a 61.7 percentage-point gap. Nine of the 12 faith schools enter over 90% of their cohort, led by the two Eden academies (99.2% and 96.1%) and St Peter's RC High School (98.2%). The exception is Manchester Academy: GIAS-designated Christian, but entering only 15.7% of its pupils – below the citywide average and closer to a typical community school than to any other faith-designated school in Manchester, a reminder that a religious designation at GIAS is not itself a guarantee of high entry. This is Manchester's own pattern, not a rule about faith schools in general: comparable checks in other Leading Tuition cities have found individual faith-designated schools sitting well below their local non-faith average, so a religious character alone should never be assumed to predict a school's entry rate – each school's own figure is what matters.

It would be easy to assume the gap is really about EBacc pressure – that schools chasing a high EBacc entry rate squeeze Religious Studies out of the optional blocks, and faith schools simply care less about EBacc. Manchester's own data says the opposite. Across all 30 schools, a school's EBacc entry rate has essentially no relationship with its Religious Studies entry rate at all (Pearson's r of -0.013 on n=30, as close to zero as a real-world correlation gets). And the faith-designated schools, on average, actually run a lower EBacc entry rate than the non-faith schools – 43.1% against 52.8% – despite entering more than three times the share of pupils for Religious Studies. Whatever drives Manchester's faith schools to near-universal Religious Studies entry, it is not EBacc pressure working in reverse; the two measures move independently of each other here. Comparable checks in other Leading Tuition cities, for the same subject, have found EBacc correlations ranging from strongly positive to strongly negative with no consistent direction at all, so Manchester's own near-zero figure describes Manchester and should not be assumed to hold elsewhere, in either direction.

Is GCSE Religious Studies entry rising or falling – in Manchester and nationally?

Nationally, GCSE Religious Studies is the single largest non-EBacc GCSE subject by entries, and has been essentially flat for the past year. Ofqual's provisional entries data, published 9 June 2026, records 242,310 entries in the June 2025 series falling to 240,945 in June 2026 – a fall of 0.6%, the only direction of movement shown in the same government table, but from a base far larger than any other non-EBacc subject: more than Art and Design (199,435 in 2026), more than Business Studies (141,135), more than Physical Education (82,185), all in the same 2026 series.

Manchester's own citywide rate has no directly published local-authority comparator – DfE does not publish an LA-level Religious Studies entry percentage the way it does for some EBacc subjects – so the 45.8% rate quoted throughout this page is Leading Tuition's own sum across all 30 schools' individually-checked data, not a single figure DfE publishes for Manchester as a whole. What the school-by-school data shows, that a single citywide average could not, is that Manchester's overall rate sits between a near-universal-entry group of faith and some non-faith schools and a low-entry group of mostly non-faith academies – a genuine split between two groups of schools, not an even spread around a middle figure.

How would the government's proposed GCSE reforms affect Religious Studies in Manchester?

Two separate, dated changes affect how Religious Studies is measured, and neither has happened yet for a pupil sitting exams now. First, in its response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, published 5 November 2025, the Department for Education states: 'In advance, we will remove EBacc headline and additional measures at key stage 4. This will take 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 last one published under the current system – it is not described here as an ongoing or current measure.

Second, the same review proposes a replacement for Progress 8 and Attainment 8, still subject to consultation, intended to apply to pupils starting their GCSEs in September 2027. Under the proposal, two of the eight qualifications that make up a pupil's score (slots 5 and 6) must come from two of three fixed categories, and the Department's own 'Progress 8 and Attainment 8: an explanation of the proposed improved model' names Religious Studies, for the first time, inside 'Category A – Humanities – geography, history, religious studies', alongside ancient history. That is a genuinely different position from Business Studies, which the same document places only in the open, unconstrained 'breadth' slots (7 and 8) – under this proposal, Religious Studies would compete directly against History, Geography and Ancient History for a mandatory slot, rather than floating freely alongside sociology, economics and a long list of vocational alternatives.

Religious Education itself, as a subject, occupies an unusually unsettled position in the same document. Where the government's response commits firmly to specific changes for Business Studies, Music, PE and Science, its own 'RE' section states only that it 'will be shaped and guided by the sector on this important issue' and that 'there will need to be a clear shared position from the sector on the future of RE' before it will even consult on a draft RE curriculum or on 'proposed changes to the legislative framework within which RE sits' – the same statutory framework, in Section 80 of the Education Act 2002, described earlier on this page. No other subject covered in the same document is left waiting on sector consensus before the government will even consult; Religious Studies is the one subject here whose future curriculum, and even its own governing law, remains genuinely open.

For a Manchester family, the practical takeaway is to check which course – full or short, and which board's route – your own child's school actually enters pupils for, rather than assume from a citywide average: 29 of Manchester's 30 state secondaries enter someone, but the share ranges from an entire cohort to a single-figure minority. Leading Tuition's national GCSE History tutoring page covers the mechanics of a comparable humanities GCSE that shares Religious Studies' proposed Category A slot; this page focuses on what that national resource cannot show, school by school, for Manchester. Our tutors also support students across other subjects in the city, including our GCSE History 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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