GCSE Business Studies Tutors in Reading: The 2024/25 DfE Data on Entries, School Contrasts and Every State Secondary

In 2024/25, Reading entered 615 pupils for GCSE Business Studies — 37.2% of the borough’s 1,652-pupil cohort, nearly double England’s 19.3% entry rate — according to the Department for Education. Reading School, one of the borough’s two selective grammar schools, enters not a single pupil; under half a mile away, Kendrick School enters 106 of its 128 pupils, the highest share of any Reading secondary.

What Is GCSE Business Studies, and How Does It Differ From the Vocational Qualification Some Reading Schools Teach?

GCSE Business Studies is a standalone academic GCSE, graded on the usual 9-to-1 scale — the Department for Education’s own Key Stage 4 subject-entries dataset labels it simply “Business,” the short label DfE uses for the subject wherever it appears in this dataset, from 2018/19 to 2024/25. Two of Reading’s ten state secondaries’ results also include a Technical Award that the Department’s own school-level data titles “Small Business Management” — a vocational qualification, assessed and graded entirely differently, covered separately below. The two are never added together or substituted for each other in any figure that follows.

Nationally, four exam boards currently offer GCSE Business Studies, each verified against its own live specification rather than trusted from memory. AQA’s specification is Business, 8132, first taught from September 2017 with first exams in 2019, and remains the sole live edition of that code — unlike some AQA GCSEs, there is no separate 2025-onwards edition of 8132. Pearson Edexcel’s equivalent is Business, 1BS0, also first taught September 2017, now on its Issue 2 specification (July 2022), which updated both papers’ timing but did not create a second edition. OCR’s is Business, J204, first assessed in 2019 — OCR itself has traded as Cambridge OCR since September 2025, and its own January 2026 specification update confirms the rebrand rather than any change to J204’s content. WJEC Eduqas also currently offers the subject in England, under Qualification Accreditation Number 603/0305/0; its own specification states explicitly that this Ofqual-regulated qualification “is not available for candidates in maintained schools and colleges in Wales” — a separate, Wales-only WJEC GCSE Business specification, teaching from 2025 for award from 2027, is a different qualification regulated by Qualifications Wales, not Ofqual, and is not offered by any Reading school. DfE does not publish which board an individual Reading school uses, so the reliable way to check is your child’s own specification sheet or their school’s exams office.

Reading’s Six-Year Growth in GCSE Business Studies Entries, Against England’s Own Trend

Reading’s entries have climbed in every year but one since 2018/19, and unlike some of the borough’s other GCSE subjects the growth has not slowed. The table below sets both populations side by side; both are DfE’s state-funded figures, so the comparison is like for like. One gap in the data is worth naming rather than guessing at: DfE’s 2018/19 release does not publish a grade-5-or-above breakdown for Business Studies, for Reading or for England — an absence in the first year of the current 9-to-1 grading cycle, not a suppressed small number, since the identical gap appears in England’s own multi-hundred-thousand-pupil row.

Over those six years Reading’s entries rose from 291 to 615 — an increase of 111.3%, more than doubling — while England’s rose from 83,422 to 120,941, an increase of 45.0%. Reading’s growth is running at more than double the national rate, and by 2024/25 Business Studies accounted for 37.2% of Reading’s 1,652-pupil cohort, against 19.3% of England’s 625,648-pupil state-funded cohort — Reading’s pupils are now nearly twice as likely to be entered for the subject as pupils nationally. Grade 4+ rates for both populations have moved differently: Reading’s peaked at 80% in 2020/21 and has since fallen to 62%, while England’s has held closer to 65% throughout — growth in entries has come with some softening in Reading’s own outcomes, even as the borough continues to outpace the national entry rate by a wide margin.

Reading’s Ten Secondary Schools, Ranked by GCSE Business Studies Entries

The borough-wide total blends all ten of Reading’s state secondaries into one figure. The school list comes from an independent GIAS search, re-run today: fetching all 126 Reading local authority establishments across every phase and filtering to Secondary phase and Open status returns 11 schools. One of the 11, River Academy, opened on 1 September 2024 and had no Year 11 pupils at all in 2024/25 — its first Year 7 intake will not reach Year 11 until 2028/29 — so it carries no 2024/25 results and is excluded below. The other 10 all reported outcomes. John Madejski Academy closed on 31 December 2024 and was succeeded by Hartland High School at the same address under a new URN; the 2024/25 results below are still published under the predecessor’s name and URN because DfE’s performance tables have not yet carried results across to the new one.

Reading’s own GIAS listing carries no OPEN sixth-form or further education college of its own: the borough’s one FE-phase establishment on record, Reading College and School of Arts and Design, is closed. A working post-16 college does still operate in the city under the Reading College name, run by Activate Learning — but its own single GIAS establishment record sits under a further education corporation headquartered in Oxfordshire, not a Reading local-authority listing, and it teaches only pupils aged 16 and over. Every figure on this page measures Year 11 (Key Stage 4) pupils, so that college has no bearing on any number below; the ten schools in the table are the complete Year 11 population.

Kendrick School enters the largest share of its own pupils by a wide margin — 82.8%, more than double the next-highest, Maiden Erlegh’s 59.4%. Reading School and UTC Reading are the only two of Reading’s ten reporting secondaries to enter nobody at all for GCSE Business Studies, for entirely different reasons explored below. The ten schools’ own entries sum to exactly 615 — matching the LA total precisely, with no gap to account for, unlike some of Reading’s other GCSE subjects. Kendrick, a selective girls’ school whose GIAS gender of entry is recorded as girls only, alone supplies 106 of Reading’s 321 female entrants for the subject — 33.0% of every girl entered for Business Studies anywhere in the borough. Reading School, a selective boys’ school under half a mile from Kendrick, supplies none of Reading’s 294 male entrants; every one of them comes from the borough’s other eight reporting schools. Reading as a whole entered slightly more girls than boys for the subject in 2024/25 — 321 against 294, 52.2% female — the reverse of England’s own entry, where boys outnumber girls 73,970 to 46,971, 61.2% male.

Is There Really an EBacc Squeeze on GCSE Business Studies in Reading?

One hypothesis worth testing directly, rather than assuming: option blocks are finite, so a school that enters most of its cohort for the full EBacc — English, maths, science, a language and history or geography — might have less room left for an optional subject like GCSE Business Studies. The Government’s own response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, published 5 November 2025, states plainly: “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.” So every EBacc figure below is the 2024/25 measure, the last full year before that change, not a continuing one. The table sets each school’s own 2024/25 EBacc entry rate, published on its own summary page on the Department’s Compare School and College Performance service, against the same school’s Business Studies share from the table above.

Tested directly across Reading’s ten reporting schools — a small enough sample that no single figure here should be read as a firm result — the relationship is a weak positive correlation, not the squeeze a simple option-block story would predict: Pearson’s r is +0.23 across all ten. That number moves a long way on one school: remove UTC Reading, which sits at 0% on both measures, and r flips to a near-flat −0.09; remove UTC Reading and Reading School together and it rises to +0.37. With only ten schools, the individual names below are more informative than any single coefficient, and this page reports what was actually measured — including its instability — rather than a conclusion the data cannot support.

The two most extreme individual schools still make a genuine, real contrast, even though ten schools cannot prove a rule from it. Reading School enters 97.3% of its pupils for the EBacc — the highest 2024/25 rate of any Reading secondary — and enters not one of them for Business Studies. Kendrick School enters an almost identical 93.8% for the EBacc and still enters 82.8% of them for Business Studies too. The likelier explanation is a confound this data cannot fully separate from the option-block story: Kendrick’s own published figures show an average of 10.9 GCSE entries per pupil, against Reading School’s 10.3 and an England average of 7.2 — a school whose pupils simply sit more GCSEs overall has more room for both a full EBacc and Business Studies, which can look like a positive correlation between the two rates while really reflecting a third factor, overall exam capacity, driving both. The WREN School adds a further complication rather than resolving it: the lowest EBacc entry rate of any reporting school outside UTC Reading, 13.5%, paired with a mid-table 53.8% Business Studies share, not the highest. UTC Reading enters 0.0% for both measures for a different reason again, covered next: a vocational-first curriculum from age 14, not the EBacc subject set at all.

The Vocational Route: Small Business Management at UTC Reading and Blessed Hugh Faringdon

Two of Reading’s ten state secondaries teach a Technical Award that DfE’s own school-level data titles “Small Business Management” — a vocational qualification, not a GCSE, assessed and graded on a Level 1/Level 2 pass basis rather than the 9-to-1 scale. UTC Reading enters 40 pupils, exactly half of its 79-pupil cohort, and no pupils at all for GCSE Business Studies — consistent with its 0.0% EBacc entry rate and its published university-technical-college curriculum, built around technical qualifications from age 14 rather than the EBacc subject set. Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School enters 30 pupils for the vocational award alongside 60 for the GCSE itself — a genuine parallel track, not a substitute. The two schools’ combined 70 entries sit one pupil short of the Reading LA total of 71 vocational Business entries DfE publishes for 2024/25, a gap consistent with the small number of state-funded alternative-provision or special-school pupils the LA figure includes and this table does not itemise by name.

Reading’s vocational entries have fallen sharply and unevenly across these seven years: from 99 pupils in 2018/19 to a peak of 166 in 2023/24, then down to 71 in 2024/25 — a 57.2% single-year fall. England’s own vocational Business entries fell too over the same year, from 45,121 to 40,205, but by only 10.9% — Reading’s drop is running at more than five times the national rate. DfE’s data does not explain why a school changes which vocational qualification it enters pupils for from one year to the next, and neither of Reading’s two vocational schools publishes that reasoning either; the honest position is to report the fall precisely rather than to guess at its cause.

How Different Are the Four Exam Boards’ GCSE Business Studies Papers?

Yes — and the shift away from it happened years before Reading’s own data begins. OCR’s previous GCSE Business Studies specification, J253, first taught in the 2012 cohort, included a controlled-assessment unit that OCR’s own guide to controlled assessment states was worth 25% of the total qualification. When Ofqual’s wider GCSE reform introduced the current 9-to-1 specifications — AQA’s 8132 and Pearson Edexcel’s 1BS0 both first taught from September 2017, OCR’s J204 first assessed in 2019, and WJEC Eduqas’s specification also teaching from 2017 — all four current specifications describe themselves explicitly as linear, wholly externally-examined qualifications with no coursework or controlled-assessment component of any kind.

The four boards do not all structure their exams the same way, and the differences are real rather than cosmetic. AQA’s 8132 and Pearson Edexcel’s 1BS0 are both split into two written papers of 1 hour 45 minutes each, 90 marks apiece, each worth exactly 50% of the GCSE — Edexcel’s papers only reached that length in its Issue 2 specification (July 2022), having previously run 1 hour 30 minutes each. OCR’s J204 also splits 50/50 across two papers, but each lasts only 1 hour 30 minutes. WJEC Eduqas is the outlier: its two components are not equally weighted at all — Component 1, Business Dynamics, runs 2 hours and is worth 62.5% of the qualification, while Component 2, Business Considerations, runs 1 hour 30 minutes for the remaining 37.5%. A family whose child is entered through Eduqas is therefore sitting a meaningfully different exam structure to one entered through any of the other three boards, even though all four lead to the same GCSE grade scale.

Where Does GCSE Business Studies Sit in a Reading Pupil’s Attainment 8 Score?

Attainment 8 measures a pupil’s best results across eight qualification slots — DfE’s own definition: “Attainment 8 measures the average achievement of pupils in up to 8 qualifications. This includes: English language; English literature (double weighted providing both English language and English literature are taken); maths (double weighted); three further qualifications that count in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc); and three further qualifications that can be GCSE qualifications (including EBacc subjects) or any other non-GCSE qualifications on the DfE approved list.” Because GCSE Business Studies is not one of the EBacc subjects, a pupil’s result in it can only ever land in the three open slots — never the three EBacc slots — the reverse of a subject like Computer Science, History or a language, which can appear in either bucket depending on a pupil’s other options.

Maiden Erlegh School in Reading’s own published breakdown shows the open slots in practice: an overall Attainment 8 score of 45.6 in 2024/25, against a Reading-wide average of 50.2 and an England average of 46.1, with its EBacc-slots sub-score at 13.9 (Reading 15.2, England 13.5) and its open-slots academic sub-score at 12.6 (England 11.5) — a score that includes the school’s 107 Business Studies entrants alongside every other non-EBacc GCSE they also take, with no way to isolate the subject’s own effect from the published figures alone.

Progress 8, the companion measure that tracks results against pupils’ Key Stage 2 starting points, is not published at all for the 2024/25 or 2025/26 cohorts. The Department states it plainly: “It is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26. This is because there is no KS2 prior attainment data available to use to calculate Progress 8 when the relevant cohorts reach the end of KS4 as primary tests and assessments were cancelled in academic years 2019/20 and 2020/21 due to COVID-19 disruption.” and confirms none is coming: “In April 2024 the previous government announced that there will be no replacement for Progress 8 for 2024/25 and 2025/26.” DfE’s next Key Stage 4 release, covering the 2025/26 cohort, is due in October 2026.

How Should Families Choose the Right Business Studies Support Across Reading’s Schools?

The practical difference the numbers above describe is not academic. GCSE Business Studies is examined entirely through written papers with no coursework element on any current specification, so consistent exam technique matters from early in the course — and which board sets those papers changes both the timing and the weighting a family should be practising against. The vocational Small Business Management route, taught at two Reading schools, is assessed on a wholly different basis again, and a family should confirm directly with their child’s school which qualification — not just which “business” class — their child is actually entered for.

Reading’s own entry pattern means support needs differ sharply by school. A family at Kendrick, Maiden Erlegh or The WREN School is likely surrounded by classmates also taking the subject, given entry shares of 82.8%, 59.4% and 53.8% respectively; a family at Reading School or UTC Reading will not find Business Studies among their child’s options at all under the current curriculum. This sits alongside our sibling GCSE Computer Science tutors in Reading page — another optional, non-EBacc subject competing for the same option-block space, where UTC Reading again enters zero pupils but for the opposite reason, having chosen a technical computing pathway there instead of the GCSE.

For the exam mechanics themselves — specification content, the AQA/Edexcel paper breakdown, the A-level pre-release case study, and June 2025 grade boundaries — our main Business Studies tuition page and our wider GCSE tuition service cover all four boards in depth, and our Economics tuition page covers the closest EBacc-adjacent alternative some Reading schools offer instead. Families further along in a Reading child’s school career may also find our guide to GCSE maths tutors in Reading useful, and those earlier in it, our coverage of 11+ tuition in Reading and 13+ tuition in Reading, including the entrance tests Reading School and Kendrick set well before either school’s Business Studies figures above — and our UK tutoring locations page covers every city we work in beyond Reading.

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