GCSE Spanish Tutors in Reading: The 2024/25 DfE Data on Spanish, French, German and the EBacc Languages Pillar

In 2024/25, Reading entered 253 pupils for GCSE Spanish — fewer than the 380 entered for French, according to the Department for Education. Nationally the position has just reversed: England now enters more pupils for Spanish (123,145) than French (119,214), the first such reversal in DfE’s published series since 2018/19. Only one language fills a pupil’s EBacc pillar, and DfE’s school-by-school data shows Reading’s ten state secondaries split unevenly across all three.

What Is the EBacc Languages Pillar, and Why Isn’t It the Same as a Spanish 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.” The language pillar is the widest of the five. DfE’s own English Baccalaureate eligible-qualifications list credits not just French, German, Spanish and “Other Modern Languages”, but Latin and Classical Greek too, plus more than a dozen separate GCSEs in community and heritage languages — Polish, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Panjabi, Gujarati, Turkish, Persian, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew and Chinese (spoken Mandarin or Cantonese) each carry their own AQA or Pearson Edexcel qualification number on that register. A pupil entering any one of these fills the same single pillar slot, so a Reading pupil who sat French, Latin or Urdu instead is credited with the languages pillar and has no Spanish entry of any kind — the languages-pillar entry rate later on this page is not the Spanish entry rate.

Nationally, as of September 2026, only two exam boards run a live GCSE Spanish specification, each verified against its own page rather than trusted from memory. AQA’s is Spanish, 8692, confirmed from the specification’s own page title. Pearson Edexcel’s is Spanish, 1SP1, confirmed from the specification PDF’s own cover page. Both are new specifications for first teaching in September 2024, with first exams in May/June 2026 — part of a wider reform across French, German and Spanish that also changed AQA’s and Edexcel’s own subject codes for the other two languages, covered in more depth in our analysis of the 2026 GCSE language results. OCR does not offer a GCSE in Spanish at all: its own current A-to-Z GCSE subject list, read in full from Ancient History through to Science, contains no French, German or Spanish qualification anywhere on it. WJEC Eduqas is a more complicated case — its own “Modern Foreign Language GCSEs for 2024” page states its draft Spanish specification was still awaiting Ofqual accreditation as of that page’s own last dated update, and Eduqas’s current live qualifications directory carries no GCSE Spanish, French or German today, only AS/A-level Spanish and an unrelated “Language Pathways” qualification. 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.

Does Reading Favour Spanish or French, and How Does That Compare with England?

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 figure.

Reading favours French over Spanish by 127 entries. Nationally the position has just reversed, and for the first time in DfE’s published series: England entered 91,735 pupils for GCSE Spanish against 116,101 for French back in 2018/19, a gap of 24,366 in French’s favour, and Spanish has closed that gap every year since, overtaking French for the first time in 2024/25 by 3,931 entries. Reading’s own Spanish entries have followed the same direction and gone further, rising from 61 in 2018/19 to 253 in 2024/25 — more than quadrupling — while Reading’s French entries rose more modestly over the same period, from 232 to 380, up 64%. Despite that growth, French still leads Spanish comfortably in Reading today, the opposite of the new national pattern. Grade outcomes cut the other way: Reading’s Spanish grade 4+ rate (75%) runs ahead of England’s (69%), while Reading’s French grade 4+ rate (63%) runs behind England’s (71%) — an 8 percentage-point gap the wrong way for Reading’s larger language.

DfE publishes the languages 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 three subject rows. In Reading, 928 pupils entered the EBacc’s languages pillar in 2024/25 — 56.2% of the 1,652-pupil cohort — against 287,294 pupils in England, 45.9% of the 625,648-pupil national cohort, a gap of more than ten percentage points in Reading’s favour. That pillar total (928) does not exactly match DfE’s own “Any modern language” subject-entries total for Reading (904) either — a 24-pupil gap that shows up nationally too, in the same direction (England’s equivalent figures are 287,294 against 285,989, a 1,305-pupil gap) — consistent with the pillar dataset also crediting Latin and Classical Greek, which the “modern language” row does not: 58 Reading pupils were entered for GCSE Latin in 2024/25, a plausible partial contributor to the gap rather than a proven one. DfE also separately publishes how many pupils sat more than one language: 116 Reading pupils (7.0% of the cohort) against 21,518 in England (3.4%) — Reading pupils are entered for a second language at roughly double the national rate, consistent with the borough’s two selective grammar schools sitting inside the same set of ten secondaries analysed below.

DfE’s own commentary on the 2024/25 results puts the size of the languages gap in context nationally: of pupils entering exactly four of the five EBacc components in 2024/25, “88.4% were missing the languages component… 11.3% were missing the humanities component” — languages, not humanities, is by far the more commonly dropped pillar when a pupil falls one short of the full EBacc. That figure describes pupils entering exactly four pillars nationally, not Reading specifically, and it is not the same measure as the languages-pillar entry rate above.

Which Reading Schools Teach Spanish, French or German – and Where Do Community Languages Lead Instead?

The borough-wide entries above blend all ten of Reading’s state secondaries into one figure. To see which language each school actually pushes, we went to each school’s own DfE subjects-entered page and pulled its Spanish, French and German 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 with explicit filters: fetching all 126 Reading local authority establishments and filtering to Status = Open and Phase of education = Secondary 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. John Madejski Academy closed on 31 December 2024, confirmed at GIAS by its own URN, and was succeeded on the same site by Hartland High School; its 2024/25 results are still published under the old name, so the table below carries that name.

The ten schools’ own Spanish entries add up to exactly 253 and their German entries to exactly 197 — both matching Reading’s published LA totals to the pupil, with nothing left over. Their French entries add up to 381, one over the published 380, a gap of the same small size the sibling History page’s own school-versus-LA reconciliation found for Geography in this city; it is not evidence that a school is missing from the table.

Two findings stand out. Kendrick School, one of Reading’s two selective grammars, enters no pupils for GCSE Spanish at all — its dominant modern language is German (81), well ahead of French (49), with Spanish entirely absent from its 2024/25 subjects list. Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School shows the opposite kind of imbalance: just 1 Spanish entry against 54 for French, and 31 for GCSE Polish — more Polish entries than any other language bar French at that school, and the single largest community-language entry anywhere in the borough, out of a 186-pupil cohort. Highdown enters 30 pupils for Chinese, the second-largest community-language figure in Reading. Reading Girls’ School is the borough’s biggest Spanish school by some margin, entering 85 pupils against only 26 for French — more than three times as many. DfE does not explain why any school enters the languages it does, and this page does not speculate; these are the published 2024/25 entries, nothing more.

What Does GCSE Spanish Actually Test, and How Do AQA and Edexcel Differ?

Verified directly against AQA’s own specification document rather than trusted from memory, GCSE Spanish (8692) is a linear qualification assessed across four equally weighted papers — Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing, each worth 25% of the GCSE. AQA sets a Foundation tier (grades 1–5) and a Higher tier (grades 4–9), and a student must sit all four papers at the same tier; there is no mixing tiers by skill. AQA states that its assessment objectives “are set by Ofqual and are the same across all GCSE Spanish specifications and all exam boards”, and are weighted AO1 35%, AO2 45% and AO3 20% overall — a regulatory floor rather than an AQA-specific choice.

The two live boards differ most in how speaking is assessed. On AQA, Paper 2 (Speaking) is a non-exam assessment: the pupil’s own teacher conducts and marks a role-play, a reading-aloud-and-conversation task and a photo-card discussion, worth 50 marks at both tiers. On Pearson Edexcel, speaking is Paper 1 rather than Paper 2, and while it is also conducted in school by the pupil’s own teacher, the recording is sent to Pearson to be marked externally — the specification’s own wording is “internally conducted and externally assessed”. Both boards’ listening papers use a studio-recorded test with built-in pauses and repetitions, and both include a short dictation exercise. DfE does not aggregate which board an individual school has chosen, so two Reading schools cannot be assumed to be assessing speaking the same way even if both teach Spanish.

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

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.” Spanish sits inside that middle group of three EBacc slots, alongside science, humanities and a second language if a pupil also takes one — there is no separate “Spanish element” the way there is an English element and a maths element. Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic 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 13.3 in 2024/25, against a Reading-wide EBacc-slots average of 15.2 and an England average of 13.5, next to the school’s own overall Attainment 8 score of 46.0, which sits below the Reading LA average of 50.2, with no Spanish, French or Polish 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 Spanish Support for Reading’s Language Landscape?

The school-by-school split above matters more for planning than the borough-wide averages suggest. A family at Kendrick School is choosing Spanish tuition for a pupil whose own school does not teach the subject at GCSE at all — support has to build a course essentially from scratch, or the family needs to confirm whether German or French fits their child’s timetable better. A family at Reading Girls’ School, by contrast, is likely surrounded by classmates doing Spanish, in a school where it is the largest modern language by a wide margin. A family at Blessed Hugh Faringdon is more likely to have a child doing French or Polish than Spanish, given the school’s own entry pattern.

DfE does not publish which exam board an individual Reading school has chosen, or how it structures its speaking assessment — that information sits with the school itself. A pupil doing two languages, one of the 116 Reading pupils DfE records as entering more than one, is managing two entirely separate specifications and two separate speaking-assessment formats 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, tiering, grade boundaries once the first 2026 results are published — our wider GCSE tuition service covers AQA and Pearson Edexcel Spanish in depth, alongside our sibling pages for GCSE English tutors in Reading, GCSE History 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 our UK tutoring locations page covers every city we work in beyond Reading.

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