GCSE Religious Studies Tutors in Nottingham

GCSE Religious Studies tutoring in Nottingham supports a subject every state school must teach but far from all enter for the exam: across the 18 Nottingham City secondaries with published 2024/25 data, entry ranges from zero pupils at three schools to 99.5% of the cohort at The Trinity Catholic School, a citywide rate of 45.4%. Our specialist tutors work with pupils on whichever exam board and course length their own school has actually chosen.

Why Must Every Nottingham School Teach Religious Studies, Yet Most Enter Almost Nobody For The GCSE?

Teaching religious education and entering a pupil for the GCSE are two different legal questions, and Nottingham's schools answer them very differently. 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. Academies are not maintained schools, so section 80 does not apply to them in the same way — but the same requirement is written into every academy's own funding agreement, which is why gov.uk's own national curriculum guidance states plainly that “RE is compulsory in schools up to the age of 18” and that “local councils are responsible for deciding the RE syllabus, but faith schools and academies can set their own.”

Parents keep a separate right that sits alongside the duty rather than cancelling it. Section 71(1) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 lets a parent request their child be “wholly or partly excused from receiving religious education given at the school in accordance with the school's basic curriculum,” and that right applies at any age, including sixth form. A narrower, separate subsection covers withdrawal from collective worship specifically, and that one does not extend to sixth-form pupils — the two rights are not the same thing, even though both get called “withdrawal from RE” in everyday conversation.

None of this legal framework says anything about the GCSE itself, which is exactly why Nottingham's entry figures below run from zero to almost the whole cohort. Nottingham University Samworth Academy, The Bulwell Academy and Farnborough Spencer Academy all publish full “subjects entered” tables covering dozens of GCSEs and vocational awards for their 2024/25 Year 11 cohort, and Religious Studies simply does not appear as a row on any of the three — not suppressed, not redacted, genuinely absent. All three still teach RE, because the statutory duty above requires that regardless of exam entry.

Full Course Or Short Course: Which GCSE Religious Studies Are Nottingham Schools Actually Entering?

GCSE Religious Studies exists as two separately accredited qualifications rather than two lengths of the same paper: a full course, worth one GCSE, and a short course, worth half a GCSE with a lighter content list and fewer assessed hours. A pupil revising for the wrong one wastes time on content that will not be examined, so the distinction genuinely changes how a programme of study should be built, not just how it is labelled.

Checked directly against each board's own current qualifications catalogue rather than carried over from memory, four boards currently run nine live specifications between them, and three of the four run more than one — the full comparison is below. What the Department for Education's own school-level tool will not tell a parent is which course a particular Nottingham school has entered its pupils for: every entry across the 18 schools checked for this page appears under the single label “Religious Studies GCSE” on the Compare School and College Performance service, with no separate short-course row on any of them. The only reliable way to find out which course a child is actually sitting is to ask the school directly.

Which Nottingham Secondary Schools Enter Pupils For GCSE Religious Studies?

Every school below was checked individually at GIAS, the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register, by its own unique reference number (URN), for its type and religious character — never assumed from its name. A GIAS search for open, secondary or all-through schools in the Nottingham City local authority (code 892, distinct from the surrounding county of Nottinghamshire, code 891) returns 19 establishments. One, Bluecoat Trent Academy, is too new to have a 2024/25 key stage 4 cohort — DfE Compare's own page for it states there is no data because “the school had no pupils who completed key stage 4 in 2025.” The 18 schools below are every other one, cross-checked against each school's own “Subjects entered at key stage 4” and “EBacc additional measures” pages, both read on 2 September 2026. This page does not cover Nottingham High School, Nottingham Girls' High School GDST or Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College, which are independent and outside DfE's state-funded key stage 4 measures, nor Nottingham College or Bilborough College, which are post-16 only and run no key stage 4 cohort.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance service, “Subjects entered at key stage 4” and “EBacc additional measures” pages for each named school; religious character from GIAS. 2024/25 data, read 2 September 2026. Percentages are of each school's own key stage 4 cohort.

Summed across these 18 schools, 1,532 of 3,377 pupils — 45.4% — were entered for GCSE Religious Studies in 2024/25. That is this page's own arithmetic, not a DfE-published city total: every one of these 18 schools' own “EBacc additional measures” page also carries a separate, DfE-published “Local authority” comparator column showing 3,455 pupils for Nottingham, a figure that stays constant across every school's page and is 78 higher than this page's own sum of individually-sourced cohorts. The two figures come from different surfaces — one is DfE's own local authority-wide comparator, the other is this page's school-by-school addition — and are not claimed to reconcile exactly; the gap most plausibly reflects Bluecoat Trent Academy's not-yet-existing cohort and any other provision the LA figure counts that individual school pages do not.

Do Nottingham's Catholic And Church Of England Schools Enter More Pupils Than Community Schools?

GIAS records four of these 18 schools with a religious character: The Trinity Catholic School (Roman Catholic), The Nottingham Emmanuel School (Church of England), Bluecoat Aspley Academy (Church of England) and Bluecoat Wollaton Academy (Church of England). Their GCSE Religious Studies entry rates are 99.5%, 97.4%, 96.2% and 89.4% — an average of 95.6%, and every one of the four sits above every non-faith school bar two. The 14 schools GIAS records with no religious character average 29.9%, but that average hides a huge range: from zero at three schools to 92.9% at Fernwood School and 93.9% at Park Vale Academy, both matching the faith schools almost exactly despite carrying no religious designation at all.

Bluecoat Beechdale Academy is worth reading closely on its own, because its name invites the wrong assumption. It shares the Bluecoat name and the Archway Learning Trust with Aspley and Wollaton, both Church of England — but GIAS records Beechdale's own religious character as “does not apply,” confirmed at its own URN rather than read off the family name. Despite that, Beechdale still enters 86.7% of its cohort, closer to its two faith-designated sister academies than to the fourteen-school non-faith average. Religious character predicts high GCSE Religious Studies entry reliably in this Nottingham sample — every faith-designated school clears 89% — but it is not the only route to a high rate, and a shared trust or a shared name is not proof of a shared religious character either way.

Does A High EBacc Entry Rate Squeeze Out GCSE Religious Studies In Nottingham?

The English Baccalaureate's humanities pillar counts history or geography, not Religious Studies, so a school chasing a high EBacc entry rate is in principle competing for the same optional timetable blocks that Religious Studies would otherwise use. That is a plausible mechanism, and it is worth testing directly on Nottingham's own schools rather than assuming it holds.

It does not hold here. Measured across all 18 Nottingham City schools on this page, the correlation between a school's 2024/25 EBacc entering rate and its GCSE Religious Studies entry rate is +0.11 — a weak, practically negligible relationship in either direction, on a sample of 18 schools. Nottingham Free School illustrates why: it posts the second-highest EBacc entering rate in the city, 64.7%, yet enters only 21.8% of its cohort for Religious Studies. Bluecoat Wollaton Academy shows the opposite combination — a low 11.9% EBacc rate alongside 89.4% Religious Studies entry. This mirrors what other cities in this same review found when they measured their own schools independently, rather than assuming the squeeze: no consistent direction. The more likely explanation is a confound rather than a mechanism — schools with stronger overall attainment tend to enter pupils for more subjects across the board, in both the EBacc pillars and outside them, which would produce exactly this kind of weak, inconsistent association without either subject actually competing with the other for space.

Two other GCSE subjects with their own EBacc relationship are worth a look if this question interests you: our GCSE Business Studies tutoring in Nottingham page finds a similar pattern on a different non-EBacc subject, while our GCSE History tutoring in Nottingham page covers a subject that sits inside the humanities pillar itself.

The Exam Board Landscape: Four Boards, Nine Live GCSE Religious Studies Specifications

Four boards currently run a live GCSE Religious Studies specification, and three of the four run more than one. Confirmed directly on each board's own current qualifications page — not carried over from a previous year's list or inferred from a resolving URL — the picture is more varied than a single “GCSE Religious Studies” entry suggests:

Source: AQA, OCR, Pearson Edexcel and WJEC Eduqas, each board's own live qualifications page, read 2 September 2026. QAN/QN is the Ofqual qualification (accreditation) number as published by the awarding body.

AQA runs three codes because Religious Studies A and Religious Studies B are two distinct, separately accredited specifications with different content routes rather than two names for one paper, and both were reissued as a September 2025 edition alongside the short course. Pearson Edexcel's two full courses carry their own subtitles — Religious Studies A is “Faith and Practice in the 21st Century” and Religious Studies B is “Beliefs in Action” — and Pearson currently publishes no live short course, only the two full-length options. WJEC Eduqas structures things differently again: one full-course code, C120QS, covers two content options called Route A and Route B, alongside a separate short-course code, C125QT. This comparison covers each board's own current live specification page; it is not a full history of every Religious Studies specification any board has ever withdrawn or superseded.

How Leading Tuition Supports GCSE Religious Studies Students Across Nottingham

Our expert GCSE Religious Studies tutors help students across Nottingham with whichever board and course their own school has chosen — AQA's Religious Studies A or B and its Short Course, OCR's full or short course, WJEC Eduqas's Route A or Route B content, or Pearson Edexcel's Faith and Practice or Beliefs in Action route. Sessions are built around the pupil's own specification and their own school's assessment objectives, not a generic revision list, which matters given how differently the boards above structure the subject. Third-party tutoring marketplaces list Nottingham Religious Studies tutors from around £15 an hour, according to Superprof listings read on 2 September 2026 — our own specialist tutors build every programme around the exact board and paper structure a pupil's school has entered them for, with 91% of our students going on to achieve their desired grades. For revision support across every subject a Nottingham GCSE cohort sits, see our wider GCSE tuition programme, or our GCSE Spanish tutoring in Nottingham and GCSE Computer Science tutoring in Nottingham pages for two of the subjects competing for the same optional timetable slots. The national GCSE History subject page also covers how EBacc pressure plays out in a humanities subject that Religious Studies itself sits outside.

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