GCSE Statistics Tutors in Reading: 2 of 18 Schools Enter It

GCSE Statistics is an optional extra GCSE, taken alongside GCSE Maths rather than instead of it, and in Reading almost no school enters anyone for it. Of the eighteen Reading schools in the Department for Education's 2024/25 key stage 4 institution-level subject data, two have a GCSE Statistics entry row: Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School with 43 entries and Highdown School and Sixth Form Centre with 22. Those 65 are the borough's entire published total.

Which Reading Schools Actually Entered GCSE Statistics in 2024/25?

Eighteen schools in Reading local authority appear in the Department for Education's key stage 4 institution-level subject data for 2024/25 with at least one GCSE entry row — which is what puts each of them in the set. Two have a row for GCSE Statistics. The table is that set in full, ordered by subjects entered.

Source: DfE key stage 4 institution-level subject entries and grades, 2024/25, GCSE (9-1) Full Course, Reading local authority. “None” means no entry row for that subject. The five with no GCSE Maths row are all recorded on Get Information about Schools as independent schools.

The reconciliation makes this more than a sample. Filtered to nothing but the subject and Reading, the institution-level file returns exactly two GCSE Statistics rows for the whole borough, under any qualification type — so no school with a Statistics row is missing from the table above. Those two rows agree with a second, separately published file: Blessed Hugh Faringdon's 43 and Highdown's 22 come to 65, precisely the figure the department publishes for Reading local authority as a whole. 43 + 22 = 65.

That check does not land as neatly on GCSE Maths. The thirteen school rows for Maths sum to 1,614 against an authority total of 1,610. The department footnotes its local-authority figures as covering state-funded schools only and as excluding pupils recently arrived from overseas; it publishes no reconciliation between the two bases, and this page does not attempt one.

The eighteen are not eighteen mainstream secondaries, and the mix matters. Ten carry a phase of education of “Secondary” on Get Information about Schools; Thames Valley School and Hamilton School are state special schools; and the remaining six, among them Queen Anne's School, The Abbey School Reading and Leighton Park School, are recorded there as independent. Independents are absent from the authority-level file, which is state-funded only, but do appear at institution level — which is why all five schools with no GCSE Maths row are independent.

Two schools in that table have since closed. John Madejski Academy closed on 31 December 2024 under the reason “Fresh Start”, and its successor Hartland High School opened on 1 January 2025. St Joseph's College, independent, with entry rows in 18 GCSE subjects, closed on 10 July 2026 with no successor recorded. Statuses were checked on Get Information about Schools on 18 September 2026.

The result most likely to surprise a Reading parent is which schools are absent. Reading School and Kendrick School, the borough's two selective schools and the two whose maths results sit at the top of the attainment table on our page for GCSE maths tutors in Reading, both appear in this file for GCSE Maths — 149 and 128 entries — and neither has a GCSE Statistics row. Strong maths results and an appetite for a second maths-family GCSE are separate things, and in Reading they do not coincide.

Why Reading's GCSE Statistics Entries Swing From 198 to 1 to 65

Across the seven years the Department for Education publishes, Reading's GCSE Statistics entries do not trend. They zigzag: 41, 198, no row at all, then 1, 23, 29 and 65. Two of those years cannot be read alongside the rest, and the reason is in the department's own methodology rather than in anything that happened in Reading.

Source: DfE subject pupil-level local authority data, Reading (E06000038), state-funded schools, total pupil entries. Shares are derived here from the raw counts in the same file, not from a published percentage.

The key stage 4 methodology is explicit about both. Summer exams were cancelled; 2019/20 grades were centre assessment grades and 2020/21 teacher-assessed grades, and the department states that “2020 and 2021 data should not be compared to previous years’ attainment data for the purposes of measuring changes in pupil performance”. A second reason bears on entries specifically: the rule deciding which of a pupil's entries counts changed for exactly that window, with “the return of first entry discounting rules after the use of best entry discounting in 2019/20 and 2020/21”. The 198 is therefore not evidence that GCSE Statistics was once popular in Reading and collapsed.

The gap at 2020/21 is a missing row, and it is worth being precise about what that does and does not establish. The file never publishes a zero: across all 271 GCSE entry rows returned for Reading over the seven years and every subject, the smallest value is 1 and the value 0 never appears once. Nor is the row likely to have been suppressed — the department's stated rule is narrower than a small-numbers rule, and applies “for the 2021 statistical release … only where an aggregation covers only one school”, which does not describe Reading. What the department does not do anywhere is say what a missing row means, so the honest reading is that no entries were recorded in this file that year, not that a zero has been confirmed.

That also settles the 1 recorded in 2021/22. It is a literal count of one entry, not a rounded or masked figure: the same file records a 1 for Dance in 2019/20 and for Other Sciences in 2020/21, and nothing in the methodology rounds a count of pupils. One pupil in the whole borough was entered for GCSE Statistics that year.

What the zigzag really reflects is how few schools are involved. When the entire borough total rests on two departments, one school adding or dropping the course moves the line by tens of entries in a single year. The rise from 1 in 2021/22 to 65 in 2024/25 is real and it runs in one direction across four consecutive years, but it is a two-school movement, and it would reverse just as fast if either school stopped. Anyone planning around it should treat it as a decision by two schools rather than a trend in the town.

How Reading's GCSE Statistics Entry Share Compares With the South East

A raw entry count says nothing on its own, because a bigger authority enters more of everything. The comparison that means something is Statistics entries set against GCSE Maths entries in the same authority and the same year, derived from the two raw counts rather than from any published percentage.

In 2024/25 Reading recorded 65 Statistics entries against 1,610 in GCSE Maths. That is 4.04 per cent, or roughly one Statistics entry for every 25 in Maths. Across the South East as a whole the same calculation gives 6,423 against 96,603, which is 6.65 per cent, or about one in 15. Reading share is roughly three-fifths of its region's.

The two were not always apart. In 2018/19 Reading stood at 3.68 per cent and the South East at 3.82 per cent — effectively level. Across the five comparable years, leaving the two pandemic years out altogether, the regional share stayed inside a band from 3.8 to 7.0 per cent; the region also has a row in every one of the seven years, including 2020/21. Reading, over those same five years, went from 3.68 per cent to a single entry and back to 4.04. The region moved inside a narrow band; the borough lurched.

Two cautions belong with those numbers. They count entries, not pupils, and a local-authority total spans special schools as well as mainstream ones, so this is a ratio of entries and not a participation rate. And the comparison is drawn against the South East rather than England on purpose: the department's national rows for this subject are built on a different basis from its local-authority rows, which it footnotes as covering state-funded schools only and as excluding pupils recently arrived from overseas. Setting a borough figure against a regional one from the same file and the same basis is the honest comparison. For the national picture, including UK-wide entry and attainment figures, our guide to GCSE Statistics carries it with its own sources.

What a Two-School Pattern Means When You're Choosing GCSE Statistics Support in Reading

The practical consequence of 2 out of 18 is that the same request means three different things in Reading, depending on which school a child attends.

If your child is at Blessed Hugh Faringdon or Highdown. The school already enters the qualification, so the work is to keep Statistics and GCSE Maths moving together rather than to build the course from nothing. Blessed Hugh Faringdon recorded 43 Statistics entries against a Year 11 cohort of 186 pupils in 2024/25; Highdown recorded 22 against a cohort of 248. The department publishes no pupil-level link between the two subjects, so those are two entry counts from the same school rather than a measure of how many pupils sat both. Our tutors teach to whichever specification the school has entered — AQA GCSE Statistics (8382) or Edexcel GCSE Statistics — and AQA sets its own out on the specification page for 8382.

If your child is at one of the other sixteen. There is no in-school entry to join, so the route is the private-candidate one: entering through an approved centre without being enrolled there. That mechanism, and the rules on a school registering as a new centre, are set out in full with the awarding body's own wording on our GCSE Statistics guide. It needs arranging well ahead of the exam series, because a centre has to agree to take the entry, and it is the reason this page lists all eighteen rather than leaving the rest as a residual.

If you are weighing it up at all. It is worth knowing what the qualification does and does not earn. The Department for Education's EBacc guidance lists five subject areas — English language and literature, maths, the sciences, geography or history, and a language — and GCSE Statistics is not among them, with qualifications needing to be on an approved list to count towards the measure at all. That does not make it a weak qualification; it does mean a school running it earns nothing for it in that particular measure, which is part of why so few timetables in Reading carry it.

Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 59 reviews, read on 17 September 2026. See also our guide to tutoring across Reading and our page on GCSE maths tutors in Reading, which covers the borough's maths attainment school by school.

Frequently Asked Questions About GCSE Statistics in Reading