Nottingham City enters just 35.1% of its pupils for the EBacc languages pillar — the lowest of the three areas this page checks — yet the pupils it does enter reach grade 4 or above more often than in Nottinghamshire or England. Our expert GCSE Spanish tutors work with Nottingham students across AQA and Edexcel.
Book a Free ConsultationIn Nottingham City's 2025 results, just 35.1% of pupils entered the EBacc languages pillar — French, German, Spanish, Latin or an approved community language — against 44.9% in Nottinghamshire and 45.9% across England. Yet among the Nottingham City pupils who do enter a language, 73.9% reach grade 4 or above, ahead of both comparators. DfE publishes each school's own language choice, and it varies sharply.
Not sure whether your child's school leans Spanish, French or German? Our expert GCSE Spanish tutors help students across Nottingham across AQA and Edexcel.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppNottingham is a unitary authority covering the city itself, registered separately from Nottinghamshire, the surrounding county, on the Department for Education's own systems: Nottingham City carries local-authority code 892, Nottinghamshire code 891. Both are routinely shortened to "Nottingham" in ordinary conversation, but DfE publishes their GCSE results as two entirely separate datasets, and the two produce materially different figures on almost every measure this page checks.
Every school named on this page was checked individually at the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register, by its own unique reference number, rather than assumed from its name or address. The Oakwood Academy, Ellis Guilford School, Nottingham Girls' Academy, Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology (NUAST), Fernwood School and Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College, a small independent Islamic girls' school with a 20-pupil Key Stage 4 cohort, are all confirmed Open and registered inside Nottingham City's own local authority. None of the six is registered in Nottinghamshire, despite the county sitting immediately around the city on every side.
No, and the gap between the two measures is large. For the EBacc, a pupil satisfies the languages pillar by entering any ONE approved language — French, German, Spanish or another modern language, Latin or Classical Greek, or an approved community and heritage language such as Arabic, Polish, Urdu, Bengali or Portuguese. Nationally, of pupils who entered exactly four of the five EBacc components in the 2024/25 results, 88.4% were missing the languages component, against only 11.3% missing the humanities component — a national gap this site's own Nottingham History page independently documented for the humanities side. In Nottingham City, 35.1% of pupils entered the languages pillar in the 2025 results, but only 16.6% of the city's Key Stage 4 cohort (574 of 3,455 pupils) entered Spanish specifically. Most of the pillar is made up of other languages entirely, and a school's languages-pillar rate should never be read as its Spanish entry rate.
GCSE Spanish is also tiered, unlike some subjects this site covers for Nottingham. Under both AQA and Pearson Edexcel's current specifications, a student is entered for either Foundation tier or Higher tier and must sit that same tier across all four skills. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are each separately assessed and each carries 25% of the qualification under both boards — including a dedicated speaking assessment, conducted and marked according to the board's own procedure, rather than a skill folded into a written paper. As of 2 September 2026, two awarding bodies offer GCSE Spanish for schools in England: AQA and Pearson Edexcel. OCR does not offer a GCSE Spanish qualification at all, and WJEC Eduqas's own current qualifications list, checked directly for this page, no longer carries a GCSE Spanish entry either — though Eduqas did examine GCSE Spanish candidates through summer 2024 under an older specification, so a school's own choice of board is worth confirming rather than assuming.
Whichever board your child's school uses, the four skills carry the same weight. Our expert GCSE Spanish tutors help Nottingham students build listening, speaking, reading and writing technique against their own board's actual mark scheme.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppSet the three areas side by side on DfE's own EBacc languages-pillar measure and Nottingham City is the clear outlier — but not in the direction competitor pages usually assume. It has the LOWEST entering rate of the three, and among the pupils it does enter, the HIGHEST grade 4-or-above rate.
| Area (2025 results, state-funded) | Entering EBacc languages pillar | Grade 4+ (of those entered) | Grade 5+ (of those entered) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nottingham (city) | 35.1% | 73.9% (897) | 62.3% (756) |
| Nottinghamshire (county) | 44.9% | 72.1% (2,973) | 58.4% (2,405) |
| England (state-funded) | 45.9% | 73.1% (209,893) | 60.6% (174,223) |
Nottingham City's entering rate, 35.1%, sits 9.8 percentage points behind Nottinghamshire and 10.8 points behind England — a wide gap on the measure that actually blocks EBacc completion, since languages is the pillar most 4-of-5 EBacc pupils nationally are missing. Yet on grade 4 or above, Nottingham City's 73.9% edges ahead of England's 73.1% and comfortably clears Nottinghamshire's 72.1%; on grade 5 or above its 62.3% is clearly the highest of the three, 1.7 points ahead of England and 3.9 points ahead of Nottinghamshire. Fewer Nottingham City pupils take a language at all, but the ones who do are not being let down by it.
Spanish has been displacing French as England's most-entered modern foreign language, and Nottingham City's own 2025 figures follow the national pattern — but by a wider margin than either comparator area.
| Area (2025 results) | Spanish entries | French entries | German entries | Other Modern Languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nottingham (city) | 574 (16.6%) | 387 (11.2%) | 71 (2.1%) | 312 (9.0%) |
| Nottinghamshire (county) | 1,730 (18.9%) | 1,628 (17.8%) | 640 (7.0%) | 373 (4.1%) |
| England (state-funded) | 123,145 (19.7%) | 119,214 (19.1%) | 29,898 (4.8%) | 33,746 (5.4%) |
The percentages in that table are Leading Tuition's own calculation, dividing each area's published subject entries by its published Key Stage 4 cohort (3,455 pupils in Nottingham City, 9,168 in Nottinghamshire, 625,647 across England); DfE publishes the raw totals and the cohort separately, not a ready-made rate. On that calculation, Spanish leads French in all three areas, but the margin differs sharply: Nottingham City enters 48% more pupils for Spanish than French (574 against 387), Nottinghamshire only 6% more (1,730 against 1,628), and England just 3% more (123,145 against 119,214). Nottingham City's own preference for Spanish over French is, on this measure, the most pronounced of the three areas checked for this page. German remains a minority choice everywhere, entered by only 2.1% of Nottingham City's cohort against 7.0% in Nottinghamshire.
Whether your child's school enters almost everyone for Spanish, or almost no one. Our expert GCSE Spanish tutors help students across Nottingham build a plan around their own school's actual language choice.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppCitywide averages hide how differently individual Nottingham City schools choose between Spanish, French and German. Checked against six named schools, the range runs from a school with no Spanish at all to one where more than half the cohort takes it.
| Nottingham City school (2025) | KS4 cohort | Spanish | French | German |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nottingham Girls' Academy | 156 | 87 (55.8%) | 0 | 0 |
| Ellis Guilford School | 267 | 48 (18.0%) | 30 (11.2%) | 0 |
| The Oakwood Academy | 142 | 35 (24.6%) | 21 (14.8%) | 0 |
| NUAST | 122 | 20 (16.4%) | 0 | 0 |
| Fernwood School | 297 | 0 (0%) | 68 (22.9%) | 67 (22.6%) |
| Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College | 20 | 0 (0%) | 0 | 0 |
Fernwood School is the clearest outlier of all: it teaches French (68 entries) and German (67 entries) in almost identical numbers, yet its own subjects-entered data records not a single Spanish entry — the exact opposite of the national pattern this page's earlier table shows, checked directly against the school's own published table rather than assumed. Nottingham Girls' Academy sits at the other extreme: 87 of its 156 pupils, 55.8%, sit Spanish, and none sit French or German at all. Between them, The Oakwood Academy and Ellis Guilford School both teach Spanish alongside French, at more modest shares of their cohorts. These six schools are not a ranking of every Nottingham secondary; a family's own school result is the one that actually matters, and any Nottingham school can be looked up directly on DfE's Compare School and College Performance service, linked in the sources below.
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A pupil who never sits Spanish, French or German can still satisfy the EBacc languages pillar through an approved community or heritage language, and DfE's own school-level data shows this is a real, substantial route at several Nottingham City schools — not a theoretical option. Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College is the cleanest case of all: every one of its 20 pupils sits GCSE Arabic, and the school's subjects-entered table lists no other language at all. Its entire Key Stage 4 cohort satisfies the languages pillar through a community language, with none of the modern European languages entered by a single pupil.
The other five schools checked for this page show smaller but genuine community-language entries alongside Spanish, French or German. Ellis Guilford School enters pupils for Arabic (2), Italian (8), Polish (9), Portuguese (1), Punjabi (1), Russian (1) and Urdu (2) — nine different languages across one cohort of 267, the widest spread of any school checked. Nottingham Girls' Academy, alongside its 87 Spanish entries, enters 12 pupils for Urdu (7.7% of its cohort), 5 for Arabic and 3 for Polish. NUAST enters pupils for Arabic (3), Urdu (3), Turkish (3), Polish (2) and Modern Greek (1). The Oakwood Academy enters 4 pupils for Polish alongside its Spanish and French cohorts, and Fernwood School, despite its Spanish-free profile, still enters pupils for Arabic (6), Chinese (5), Portuguese (2), Punjabi (2), Japanese (1), Russian (1) and Turkish (1). None of this is speculation about why a school's population looks the way it does; every figure is the school's own DfE-published subjects-entered total, checked directly rather than inferred.
DfE publishes a direct measure of this, separate from the subject entries above: the share of a school's pupils entered for more than one foreign language. Nottingham City's own local-authority figure is 3.6%, close to England's 3.4%, but the six named schools spread widely around that city average.
| School / area (2025) | Pupils entered for more than 1 foreign language |
|---|---|
| Nottingham Girls' Academy | 10.3% |
| Ellis Guilford School | 6.7% |
| Fernwood School | 3.7% |
| Nottingham (city average) | 3.6% |
| England (state-funded average) | 3.4% |
| NUAST | 2.5% |
| The Oakwood Academy | 0.0% |
| Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College | 0.0% |
This is a published DfE measure, not an estimate: entries and pupils are not the same thing, and this figure is DfE's own way of separating them. Nottingham Girls' Academy, whose 87 Spanish and 12 Urdu entries sit alongside each other in the earlier tables, has the highest rate of any school checked, 10.3% — just under three times the city and national averages — consistent with a meaningful number of its pupils sitting both a modern language and a community language in the same cohort. The Oakwood Academy and Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College sit at 0.0%: at Oakwood, no pupil is recorded taking two languages, and at Jamia Al-Hudaa it is arithmetically impossible, since the school enters every pupil for only one language, Arabic. This site's own Nottingham History page found the same entries-versus-pupils pattern in the EBacc humanities pillar; the languages pillar carries an identical trap.
A community or heritage language still satisfies the same EBacc pillar as Spanish. Our expert GCSE Spanish tutors also work with Nottingham students taking Arabic, Urdu, Polish and other GCSE languages.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppGCSE modern languages were re-specified for first teaching in September 2024, and the codes that produced the 2025 results this page reports are not the codes current Year 10 and 11 Nottingham pupils are now being taught against — a distinction no code list published from memory can be trusted to get right, which is why every code below was checked directly at the awarding body's own current page or specification document.
AQA's GCSE Spanish that produced the 2025 results was specification 8698 (Foundation tier 8698F, Higher tier 8698H, discount code FKS), first taught from 2016. AQA's own site now markets a replacement, GCSE Spanish 8692 (Foundation 8692F, Higher 8692H), for first teaching from September 2024, Ofqual qualification accreditation number 610/3530/0 — the old 8698 page remains live on AQA's own site, which is exactly why a working URL is not proof a code is still current, and the "first teaching" year printed on the page itself has to be checked.
Pearson Edexcel's replacement specification, GCSE Spanish 1SP1, carries Ofqual qualification number 610/3469/1 and is also first taught from September 2024, with first certification due in 2026, confirmed directly inside Edexcel's own specification PDF rather than its marketing page, where the code does not appear at all. Under both AQA's and Edexcel's current specifications, listening, speaking, reading and writing are separately examined papers, each carrying 25% of the qualification.
Two boards, not three or four, is the accurate current picture. OCR does not offer a GCSE Spanish qualification. WJEC Eduqas examined GCSE Spanish candidates through summer 2024, under specification entry codes C810PF (Foundation) and C810PH (Higher), Ofqual accreditation number 601/8901/0 — but Eduqas's own current qualifications list, checked directly for this page, no longer includes a GCSE Spanish entry at all, and a newer Eduqas Spanish specification document dated for teaching from 2024 still shows its own entry codes and Ofqual number as literal unfilled placeholders. Absence from a current qualifications list is not proof a board has formally withdrawn a subject, but it is not something this page will paper over either.
Sessions run one-to-one online, with a shared whiteboard that lets a tutor work through past-paper listening, reading and writing questions and mark them against the real mark scheme for a student's own board and tier, plus dedicated practice for the speaking assessment most students find hardest to prepare for alone. Every programme starts with a short diagnostic assessment against a student's own school, board and tier rather than a generic GCSE Spanish checklist, so a tutor can see immediately whether the priority is vocabulary retention, grammar accuracy, or building confidence for the speaking paper.
Programmes are reviewed roughly every half-term against a student's own target grade, with pacing adjusted if a mock exam or a school assessment shows a gap has narrowed faster, or slower, than expected. Beyond GCSE Spanish itself, our tutors also work with Nottingham students taking French, German or a community language such as Arabic, Urdu or Polish for the same EBacc pillar, plus the wider subject mix Nottingham GCSE students combine it with, including English Language and Literature and Maths.
Ready to start? Our expert Nottingham GCSE Spanish tutors build a plan around your child's actual school, board and tier from the first session. Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews, read on 22 August 2026.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppSee our full GCSE tuition overview, our GCSE resources for parents, plus our overview of tutoring across Nottingham for other subjects and levels. All DfE figures above are drawn from the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance, 2024/25 release and its Compare School and College Performance service, checked on 2 September 2026. Every named school's registration was independently confirmed at the Department's Get Information about Schools register. Exam-board spec codes are drawn directly from AQA's and Pearson Edexcel's own published specification documents.
Nottingham (the city) and Nottinghamshire (the surrounding county) are two separate Department for Education local authorities. In the 2025 results, Nottingham City entered 574 pupils for GCSE Spanish against 1,730 in Nottinghamshire and 123,145 across England - but as a share of each area's own Key Stage 4 cohort, that is 16.6% in Nottingham City, 18.9% in Nottinghamshire and 19.7% in England. The two areas are routinely confused because both are called 'Nottingham', so checking which local authority a figure describes matters before comparing schools.
No. The EBacc languages pillar counts a pupil who enters any approved language - French, German, Spanish, Latin, Classical Greek or an approved community language such as Arabic, Polish or Urdu - counted once, while Spanish is reported as its own separate subject entry. In Nottingham City's 2025 results, 35.1% of pupils entered the languages pillar, but only 16.6% entered Spanish specifically - most of the pillar is made up of other languages entirely, and a school's languages-pillar rate should never be read as its Spanish entry rate.
Among the Nottingham City schools checked for this page, Nottingham Girls' Academy entered the highest share of its pupils for GCSE Spanish in the 2025 results: 87 of its 156-pupil cohort, or 55.8%. Fernwood School, on the same city-wide dataset, entered zero pupils for Spanish despite entering 68 for French and 67 for German. This is not a ranking of every Nottingham school.
Yes. Under both AQA and Pearson Edexcel's current specifications, a student must be entered for either Foundation tier or Higher tier and must sit that same tier across all four skills - listening, speaking, reading and writing. Each of the four skills is separately assessed and each carries 25% of the qualification under both boards' published specifications, including a dedicated speaking paper marked by a teacher or examiner rather than folded into a written exam.
The Department for Education states directly that it is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26, because the pupils in these cohorts never sat Key Stage 2 SATs, which were cancelled due to COVID-19 disruption, and there is no prior-attainment data to build the measure from. The Department has also confirmed there will be no replacement measure for either year, so no Nottingham school has a genuine 2025 Progress 8 figure for GCSE Spanish or any other subject.
Two awarding bodies offer GCSE Spanish in England as of 2 September 2026: AQA (Spanish, 8692, first taught from September 2024) and Pearson Edexcel (Spanish, 1SP1, also first taught from September 2024). OCR does not offer a GCSE Spanish qualification, and WJEC Eduqas's own current qualifications list, checked directly for this page, no longer includes a GCSE Spanish entry either, though Eduqas did examine GCSE Spanish candidates through summer 2024 under an older specification. Which board a specific Nottingham school uses is set by the school itself rather than published by DfE, so it is worth checking directly with your child's school or exam department.
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