GCSE History Tutors in Reading: The 2024/25 DfE Data on History, Geography and the EBacc Humanities Pillar

In 2024/25, Reading entered 709 pupils for GCSE History — fewer than the 788 entered for Geography, its EBacc partner subject — according to the Department for Education. Nationally the pattern runs the other way: England entered more pupils for History (281,600) than Geography (274,424). Only one of these two subjects fills a pupil’s EBacc humanities slot, and DfE’s own school-by-school data shows Reading’s ten state secondaries split unevenly between them.

What Is the EBacc Humanities Pillar, and Why Isn’t It the Same as a History Entry Rate?

The English Baccalaureate is built from five pillars, and DfE states plainly which subjects satisfy each one: “The EBacc shows how many pupils are entering GCSEs (or AS level qualifications) in core academic subjects at KS4. The EBacc consists of English, maths, science, a language, and history or geography.” That last pillar is the one this page is about, and the wording matters: a pupil fills the humanities slot by entering either History or Geography, not both. A pupil who takes both subjects is still only counted once in the pillar — so adding Reading’s 709 History entries to its 788 Geography entries does not tell you how many pupils actually filled the humanities pillar. It tells you how many subject entries there were, which is a different number, counted a different way.

Nationally, GCSE History is set by four exam boards, each verified against its own specification page or document rather than trusted from memory. AQA’s specification is History, 8145. Pearson Edexcel’s equivalent is History, 1HI0, confirmed from the specification PDF’s own cover page — the code does not appear on Edexcel’s plain HTML landing page at all. OCR offers two separate History specifications: History A, Explaining the Modern World (J410), and History B, Schools History Project (J411). WJEC Eduqas’s own specification names the qualification-level entry code directly, inside a table headed “Qualification cash-in”: C100QS, alongside the Ofqual qualification number 601/8239/8. The bare “C100” that appears elsewhere in that same specification is not itself a qualification code — it is the stem shared by all sixteen individual topic-option entry codes (C100UA to C100UH for the depth-study options, C100U1 to C100U8 for the period and thematic options) as well as the cash-in code, so C100QS is the one to quote. Which of these a Reading pupil sits depends on their own school’s choice of board, not their postcode — DfE does not publish exam-board choice at local-authority level.

One more distinction is easy to lose. DfE’s Key Stage 4 statistics list “Ancient History” as its own separate subject row, entirely apart from GCSE History — and Ofqual regulates it as a separate qualification too, publishing “GCSE 9 to 1 subject-level conditions and requirements for history” alongside a distinct document for “ancient history.” In Reading’s 2024/25 cohort, 23 pupils were entered for Ancient History, every one of them at Reading School; none of the borough’s other nine state secondaries entered any pupils for it. Those 23 pupils sit inside a wider DfE grouping, “Any classical study,” which totalled 58 Reading pupils across all classical subjects — a different question from the History-versus-Geography split this page covers, and not analysed further here.

Does Reading Push History or Geography More Than England Does?

Both sides of the comparison below cover the same population: DfE’s subject-level local authority data is state-funded schools only, and the England row is the same dataset’s state-funded national total, not an all-schools or all-ages figure.

Reading favours Geography over History by 79 entries. Nationally, the position is reversed and by a wider margin: England enters more pupils for History than Geography, by 7,176. A borough that simply mirrored the national pattern would be expected to enter more History than Geography too — Reading does the opposite, and both of its grade-outcome columns sit ahead of the England rate for both subjects, so the local preference for Geography is not explained by Reading pupils finding History harder or doing worse in it.

DfE publishes the humanities pillar itself as a separate measure, in a different dataset from the subject-by-subject entries above, and it is worth reading rather than reconstructing from the two subject rows. In Reading, 1,369 pupils entered the EBacc’s humanities pillar in 2024/25 — 82.9% of the 1,652-pupil cohort — against 507,719 pupils in England, 81.2% of the 625,648-pupil national cohort. The same dataset separately publishes how many pupils were entered for both History and Geography together: 131 in Reading (7.9% of the cohort) against 45,170 in England (7.2%). Both of those are DfE’s own published figures, not calculations built on top of the subject-entries table. As a consistency check only: 709 History entries plus 788 Geography entries, minus the 131 pupils counted in both, comes to 1,366 — within a handful of pupils of the published 1,369-pupil pillar total, which is what you would expect if a pupil entered for both subjects is counted once in the pillar and twice across the two subject rows.

Reading’s overall EBacc entry rate also runs well ahead of the national figure: 53.4% of the cohort (882 pupils) against an England rate of 40.5% (253,470 pupils), a gap consistent with the borough’s two selective grammar schools sitting inside the same set of ten secondaries analysed below.

Which Reading Schools Teach More History Than Geography, and Which Do the Opposite?

The borough-wide entries above blend all ten of Reading’s state secondaries into one figure. To see which humanity each school actually pushes, we went to each school’s own DfE subjects-entered page and pulled its History and Geography entries directly, fetched and confirmed against the school’s own URN rather than assumed from its name.

The school list itself comes from an independent GIAS search, re-run today: fetching all 126 Reading local authority establishments across every phase and filtering locally to Secondary phase and Open status returns 11 schools. One of the 11, River Academy, is a free school that opened on 1 September 2024 with an 11-to-18 age range and had no Year 11 pupils at all in 2024/25 — its first Year 7 intake will not reach Year 11, the GCSE year, until 2028/29 — so it carries no 2024/25 results and is excluded below. The other 10 all reported outcomes. Hartland High School was created as a new establishment on 1 January 2025, the direct successor to John Madejski Academy on the same site with the same pupils, so its 2024/25 results are still published under the old name; the table carries that name.

The ten schools’ own History entries add up to exactly 709 — matching Reading’s published LA total to the pupil, with nothing left over. Their Geography entries add up to 787, one short of the published 788, a gap of the same small size the sibling Physics page’s own school-versus-LA reconciliation found for this city; it is not evidence that a school is missing from the table.

Two schools stand out. Kendrick School enters almost twice as many pupils for Geography as History — 92 against 52 — the widest gap in either direction anywhere in the borough. King’s Academy Prospect sits at the opposite extreme: 94 pupils for History and 94 for Geography, an exact tie. Reading School and The WREN School both lean towards History, while Blessed Hugh Faringdon, Maiden Erlegh and Reading Girls’ School all lean towards Geography, some by a wide margin. UTC Reading is the sharpest case of all: its full 2024/25 GCSE subjects-entered list — Art & Design, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Studies, Economics, both English GCSEs, French, Japanese, Mathematics, Physics, Polish, Psychology and Spanish — contains no History row and no Geography row whatsoever. Since the EBacc’s humanities pillar can only be satisfied by one of those two subjects, no pupil at UTC Reading could complete the EBacc through this pillar in 2024/25, no matter how strong their results elsewhere. That is a structural feature of the school’s curriculum, not a comment on any individual pupil’s ability.

What Does GCSE History Actually Test, and How Is It Different from Ancient History?

Beyond the population trap above, the qualification itself carries real structural differences that a borough-wide entries figure cannot show. Verified directly against AQA’s own specification document rather than trusted from memory, GCSE History (8145) is a linear qualification: students sit all their exams at the end of the course, across two papers only — Paper 1, Understanding the Modern World, and Paper 2, Shaping the Nation — each worth 84 marks and 50% of the GCSE, for a total of 168 scaled marks. There is no coursework and no non-exam assessment component: the specification’s full text contains zero occurrences of “controlled assessment” or “non-exam assessment.” Unlike maths and the three separate sciences, History also has no foundation or higher tier — the same specification text contains zero occurrences of “Foundation Tier” or “Higher Tier” either, so every pupil sits identical papers regardless of target grade.

Topic choice is where AQA’s specification does vary, and by a wide margin. Paper 1’s Section A offers a choice of four period studies — America 1840–1895, Germany 1890–1945, Russia 1894–1945, or America 1920–1973 — and Section B a choice of five wider world depth studies focused on international conflict, from the First World War through to the Gulf and Afghanistan, 1990–2009. Paper 2’s Section A offers three thematic studies covering Britain across the centuries, and Section B a choice of four British depth studies, including Elizabethan England, c1568–1603. That is 16 topic options in total across the four components, before accounting for the other three boards’ own separate option lists. DfE does not aggregate which options an individual school teaches, so a family cannot assume two Reading schools on the same board are studying the same course, let alone two on different boards.

The assessment objectives themselves are set by the regulator, not any individual board. Ofqual’s own GCSE Subject Level Conditions and Requirements for History fix the weightings directly: “AO1 Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the key features and characteristics of the periods studied. 35%”; “AO2 Explain and analyse historical events and periods studied using second-order historical concepts. 35%”; AO3, analysing and evaluating sources, and AO4, analysing interpretations, are weighted 15% each. Marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar must equal a further 5% of the subject marks. Every one of AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas has to build its own papers around those same four weightings — a regulatory floor, not a choice any one board has made independently. History also carries four assessment objectives rather than the three used across the separate sciences (AO1 to AO3), a structural difference worth knowing if a family is comparing subjects rather than just exam boards.

Why Doesn’t Attainment 8 Show a Separate Score for History?

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.” History sits inside that middle group of three EBacc slots, alongside a language, science and Geography if a pupil also takes it — there is no separate “History element” the way there is an English element and a maths element. Highdown School’s own results confirm this in practice: its Attainment 8 sub-score for “EBacc slots” — the bundle covering science, languages and humanities together — was 15.4 in 2024/25, against a Reading-wide EBacc-slots average of 15.2 and an England average of 13.5, next to Highdown’s own overall Attainment 8 score of 50.4, which sits almost exactly on the Reading LA average of 50.2, with no History, Geography or language figure broken out anywhere in that published breakdown.

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 History Support for Reading’s Exam Board Landscape?

The school-by-school split above matters more for planning than the borough-wide averages suggest. A family at Kendrick School is very likely managing a Geography-heavy year group, where a History class may be smaller and drawn from a narrower slice of pupils; a family at Reading School or The WREN School is more likely surrounded by classmates doing History; and a family at UTC Reading is not choosing between the two subjects at all — neither is on offer, so any humanities-pillar EBacc ambition has to be set aside from the start, regardless of how well a pupil is doing in their other subjects.

DfE does not publish which exam board, or which of AQA’s 16 topic options, an individual Reading school has chosen — that information sits with the school itself, if it is published anywhere at all. A pupil doing both History and Geography, one of the 131 Reading pupils DfE records as entered for both, is managing two entirely separate specifications and two separate sets of topic options inside the same academic year, which is a heavier load than the borough-wide entries figures alone would suggest.

For the exam mechanics themselves — specification content, topic options, grade boundaries across AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas — our main GCSE History tuition page and our wider GCSE tuition service cover all four boards in depth, alongside our sibling pages for GCSE English tutors in Reading and the sciences — Biology, Chemistry and Physics — for families managing more than one EBacc subject at once. 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 any pupil reaches the GCSE figures above — and our UK tutoring locations page covers every city we work in beyond Reading.

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