GCSE Religious Studies Tutors in Reading

Reading enters 422 of its 1,652 Year 11 pupils for GCSE Religious Studies in 2024/25, a smaller share (25.5%) than England’s state-funded average of 32.8%. Every maintained school in Reading must teach religious education, but that duty is separate from entering pupils for its GCSE: Reading School, Reading Girls’ School and UTC Reading enter nobody, while Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School enters 98.4% of its own cohort.

Why Reading Schools Must Teach Religious Education – Whether or Not They Enter Anyone for the GCSE

Section 80 of the Education Act 2002 sets out the “basic curriculum” that every maintained school in England must provide, and the first item on the list is “provision for religious education for all registered pupils at the school (in accordance with such of the provisions of Schedule 19 to the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 as apply in relation to the school).” The duty binds maintained schools directly; academies take it on through their own funding agreement rather than this section, which is why the government’s own plain-English guidance says RE “is compulsory in schools up to the age of 18” and adds that “local councils are responsible for deciding the RE syllabus, but faith schools and academies can set their own.” A separate provision, section 71 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, gives parents at a community, foundation or voluntary school the right to withdraw a child “wholly or partly” from the lessons.

None of that says anything about GCSE entry, and Reading’s own data shows the gap plainly. Reading School’s published 2024/25 subject list carries a “Religious Studies” row against the qualification type “AS level,” with 45 entries – and no Religious Studies row at all against “GCSE,” among 26 subjects otherwise entered. The school teaches the subject and even offers it as an examined sixth-form option; it simply does not enter a single Year 11 pupil for the GCSE. Reading Girls’ School and UTC Reading show the same GCSE figure – zero – without Reading School’s AS-level presence to explain it, which is the point: teaching religious education, offering it as a subject somewhere on the timetable, and entering a cohort for its GCSE are three separate decisions, and a school can make any one of them without making the other two.

How Has GCSE Religious Studies Entry in Reading Changed Since 2018/19?

Reading’s entries have not moved in one direction. They rose from 381 in 2018/19 to a peak of 599 in 2019/20, then fell in every subsequent year DfE has published – 567 in 2020/21, 509 in 2021/22, 450 in 2022/23, and 422 in both 2023/24 and 2024/25. That is a 29.5% fall from the 2019/20 peak, even though the 2024/25 figure still sits 10.8% above where the series started in 2018/19. England’s own entries barely moved across the same seven years – 210,806 in 2018/19, a similar peak of 211,200 in 2019/20, and 204,914 in 2024/25, a fall of only 2.8% from the earlier figure. Reading’s rise-then-fall is far sharper in both directions than the national pattern, and DfE’s published data does not explain why; the honest position is to report the swing precisely rather than to guess at a cause the figures do not support.

One caveat applies throughout this page, and it is stronger than it first looks. GCSE Religious Studies exists as a full course, graded 9 to 1 like any other GCSE, and as a short course covering roughly half the content. Neither DfE’s local authority dataset used for the figures above nor any Reading school’s own published subjects-entered table distinguishes the two – both simply read “GCSE.” Checking DfE’s separate school-level exam-entries file, which does carry a more detailed qualification field (“qualification_detailed”), shows why that silence is not an accident: across all 26,464 GCSE-type Religious Studies rows it publishes for every school in England in 2024/25, every single one reads “GCSE (9-1) Full Course” – the string “Short Course” does not appear against this subject anywhere in the file, including Reading’s own rows. That field cannot be read as proof these are full-course entries; it is the only GCSE-type value the field ever takes for this subject, so it carries no information either way. This page cannot say which course any Reading pupil sits, and the honest position is to say so rather than to fill the gap with a label that was never capable of answering the question.

Which Reading Schools Actually Enter Pupils for GCSE Religious Studies?

Ten of Reading’s state secondaries have published 2024/25 Key Stage 4 results; an eleventh, River Academy, opened on 1 September 2024 and will not reach its first Year 11 cohort until 2028/29, so it carries no results yet and is excluded from every figure below. Among the ten, entry share for GCSE Religious Studies runs from zero to 98.4% of a school’s own cohort – among the widest spreads of any GCSE subject checked across Reading’s schools.

These ten schools’ own entries add to 416 pupils against DfE’s published Reading local authority total of 422 – a gap of six. That is not an error: DfE’s Reading row counts 13 contributing establishments toward its published cohort and entry totals, three more than the ten mainstream secondaries named here, most likely reflecting a small number of pupils at a special school or alternative-provision setting that GIAS does not list as a mainstream secondary and that this page does not itemise by name. The same pattern shows in the cohort column: the ten schools’ own Year 11 numbers sum to 1,623 against the LA’s published 1,652.

One school’s row needs an explanation of its own. John Madejski Academy, URN 130247, closed on 31 December 2024; its successor, Hartland High School, URN 151631, opened the next day, 1 January 2025 – an academy re-founding at the same site, not a closure in the ordinary sense. DfE’s Compare School Performance service still files the school’s 2024/25 GCSE results, including its 17 Religious Studies entries, under the closed URN 130247; the new URN 151631 currently returns no subjects-entered page at all. A search keyed only on the live URN would miss this school’s results entirely.

Does Reading’s Only Faith School Explain the Difference?

Only one of Reading’s ten reporting state secondaries carries a religious character on GIAS’s own record: Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School, registered as Roman Catholic. Every other school returns “None,” except Hartland High School, whose GIAS record shows “Does not apply” rather than “None” – a distinct value, not a data gap. With a single faith school in the set, any comparison between “faith” and “community” schools in Reading rests on an n of one against nine, which is an anecdote rather than a correlation, and it is worth naming that plainly rather than dressing one school’s figure up as a pattern.

The anecdote itself is not simple, either. Blessed Hugh Faringdon does enter the highest share of any Reading school, 98.4% – unsurprising for the town’s only Catholic secondary. But the second-highest entering school, Maiden Erlegh School in Reading at 86.1%, carries no religious character at all under GIAS. A single faith school entering almost everyone tells a reader very little when a school with no religious character sits only 12 percentage points behind it. Whatever is driving Maiden Erlegh’s figure – a strong departmental tradition, timetabling choices, or something this data cannot show – it is plainly not “being a faith school,” because it is not one.

Does a High EBacc Entry Rate Reduce GCSE Religious Studies Entries in Reading?

Religious Studies is not one of the EBacc subjects: the Department for Education defines the EBacc as “English, maths, science, a language, and history or geography,” so Religious Studies competes for a school’s optional timetable slots rather than sitting inside the EBacc measure. A plausible mechanism suggests itself – a school that pushes hard on EBacc entry has fewer optional slots left over, so a non-EBacc subject like Religious Studies should see fewer entries where EBacc entry is highest. Reading’s own ten schools do not support it. The Pearson correlation between each school’s 2024/25 EBacc entry rate and its Religious Studies entry share is +0.048 across all ten – essentially flat, and if anything very weakly positive rather than negative. Removing Blessed Hugh Faringdon, the one school combining a relatively low EBacc rate (42.5%) with a very high Religious Studies share (98.4%), raises the coefficient only to +0.19; removing UTC Reading as well brings it back down to +0.078. None of these approach a meaningful relationship in either direction.

Two individual schools make the point more directly than any coefficient. Reading School posts the highest EBacc entry rate of any Reading secondary, 97.3%, and enters zero pupils for Religious Studies GCSE – consistent with a squeeze story. But Maiden Erlegh sits in the middle of Reading’s EBacc table at 63.3% and still enters 86.1% of its own pupils for Religious Studies, a share nearly as high as the town’s only faith school’s. A school with a mid-range EBacc rate posting one of the highest optional-subject entry rates in the town is the opposite of what a simple squeeze mechanism predicts. The more likely explanation, on this small a sample, is that some schools simply enter pupils for more GCSEs overall – a capacity effect this ten-school dataset cannot cleanly separate from any genuine EBacc effect. DfE is removing the EBacc headline and additional measures entirely from the key stage 4 performance tables for the 2025/26 academic year, to be published in autumn 2026, so this comparison will not be repeatable in its current form after that point.

Full Course or Short Course – What Is Reading Actually Teaching?

Four exam boards currently offer GCSE Religious Studies in England, and every code below was checked today against the board’s own live specification PDF rather than taken from memory or a search snippet. AQA publishes three separate live specifications: 8061, the short course; 8062, “Religious Studies A,” covering a broad choice of world religions, ethical themes and optional textual study; and 8063, “Religious Studies B,” built specifically around Catholic Christianity. All three carry the same teaching-from date, September 2016, and the same first-exams date, 2018, and all three have been revised as recently as 1 September 2025. Pearson Edexcel offers two full-course specifications, Religious Studies A (1RA0) and Religious Studies B (1RB0), both at Specification Issue 2, January 2024; this page found no live Edexcel short course, which is reported here as something not found rather than confirmed not to exist.

OCR – which has traded as Cambridge OCR since September 2025 – offers J625 as its full course and J125 as its short course, both first assessed in 2018 and both revised in 2026. WJEC Eduqas offers a full course under Qualification Accreditation Number 601/8879/0 and a short course under 601/8880/7, both “teaching from 2016, for award from 2018” and explicitly not available to Wales-maintained schools – this is the England-regulated Eduqas brand, distinct from WJEC’s own Wales-only qualifications. Eduqas’s full-course QAN is worth a second look on its own: it covers two structurally different routes, Route A (a general world-religions and ethics course) and Route B (built around Catholic theology), taught under the identical code 601/8879/0 – proof that a single accreditation number does not always identify a single specification.

How Do the Exam Boards’ Religious Studies Papers Actually Compare?

AQA’s two components, on both 8062 and 8063, are each a 1 hour 45 minute written exam, verified directly from the specification PDFs’ own assessment sections. Pearson Edexcel’s first paper on both 1RA0 and 1RB0 is also 1 hour 45 minutes, though 1RA0’s second paper – the “second religion” paper – runs only 50 minutes. OCR’s two components are the shortest of the four boards checked here, at one hour each; among the boards and routes checked for this page, only OCR has no single Religious Studies paper longer than an hour. Eduqas sits between the two extremes and varies by route: Route A opens with a 2-hour paper worth half the qualification, then two 1-hour papers; Route B uses two 1 hour 30 minute papers plus one further hour-long paper.

The content choices differ just as much as the timing. AQA’s Religious Studies A and Edexcel’s Religious Studies B both let a school choose from several world religions for the compulsory beliefs and practices paper – Edexcel offers seven, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Sikhism alongside Christianity, Catholic Christianity and Islam. AQA’s Religious Studies B and Eduqas’s Route B are built specifically around Catholic Christianity, which is why Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School’s near-total entry rate makes sense in a way a community school’s would not necessarily: a Catholic specification is a natural fit for a Catholic school’s own religious education programme, quite apart from any statutory duty. This page has not verified which specific board or route any individual Reading school teaches, and does not claim to – that would need a school-by-school check this dataset cannot answer.

Choosing the Right GCSE Religious Studies Support in Reading

The single most useful fact for a Reading family is which of these three positions their own child’s school occupies: entering almost everyone (Blessed Hugh Faringdon, Maiden Erlegh), entering a modest minority (Kendrick, Hartland High School, The WREN School, King’s Academy Prospect, Highdown), or entering nobody at all (Reading School, Reading Girls’ School, UTC Reading). A pupil at one of the three zero-entry schools who still wants to sit the GCSE – as a private candidate, for instance – faces a genuinely different preparation problem from a pupil at Blessed Hugh Faringdon working through a whole-cohort scheme of work, and the right support looks different in each case.

For families weighing Religious Studies against other optional GCSEs, our guides to GCSE History tutors in Reading and GCSE Business Studies tutors in Reading cover two of the subjects competing for the same option blocks, including the same EBacc-squeeze question tested for each subject in its own right rather than assumed from one to the next. Families whose children need support with the extended-writing questions common to Religious Studies exam papers may also find our guide to GCSE English tutors in Reading useful, and our wider GCSE tuition guide and History tuition page cover exam boards, tiers and revision approaches that apply as much to Religious Studies as to any other humanities GCSE. Our UK tutoring locations page covers every city we work in beyond Reading.

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