The government’s plans to make young people continue studying maths and English if they fail GCSEs could be demotivating and ineffective, according to education experts and school leaders after retake pass rates slumped this year.
Only one in seven students in the age group retaking GCSE maths after a previous failure got a grade 4 or above this summer, while only one in six managed to pass English, meaning the majority will have to retake the exams next year if they remain in education or training.
The lower than expected results for older students came against a more positive national picture in which students in year 11 achieved record high grades in GCSE examinations across England.
While seven in 10 of 16-year-olds achieved pass grades in maths and English, the remaining 620,000 year 11 students face retaking GCSE maths or English next year after failing to reach grade 4.
Lucy Powell, the UK education secretary, said the government would be sticking with plans for a new “stepping stone” qualification aimed at those who got a grade 2 or worse in their first attempt at GCSEs.
Powell described the current policy as “a hamster wheel” and said: “There’s got to be a better way to give young people the skills and confidence that they need to succeed, not just branding them a failure, and also allowing them to gain other qualifications that show they have a strong foundation in English and maths.
“So that’s why I want to bring in a new level-one qualification so they’ve got a strong foundation in English and maths that gives them that passport to go on for further study or an apprenticeship or a training place.”
But the plan, first announced in last year’s skills white paper, has been met with scepticism by experts and school leaders, who warned that the number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) was likely to increase as long as GCSE failure rates remained high.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “This year’s post-16 resit results reinforce the fact that the government policy of force-feeding them a relentless diet of GCSE English and maths in post-16 education is simply not working.
“Tinkering at the edges of the qualification system will not solve this problem. As long as we continue to grade students in this way in these gateway subjects of English and maths, we will continue to damage their future prospects.
“If the government is serious about tackling the Neet crisis it must grasp this nettle and rethink how we assess English and maths.”
Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, warned that the new qualification would “need a strong fairness test to ensure this doesn’t create a two-tier system in which pupils from under-resourced backgrounds are disproportionately directed onto lower-level routes.
“With around a third of young people not achieving the grade 4 benchmark in both English and maths, the system itself needs reform. This is the cruel injustice of narrow expectations: we need different pathways, but not different ceilings.”
The Department for Education’s consultation positions the new “stepping stone” qualification as preparation for a later GCSE resit, meaning young people will still face multiple examinations while they remain in education.
Paul Whiteman, head of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “We have long called for an end to the current policy which forces students into dispiriting rounds of repeated, demotivating resits.
“What is needed are more appropriate and engaging alternatives to GCSEs in English and maths at key stage 4 which enable students to study for qualifications that better suit their needs and aspirations.”
This year, the results revealed a strong performance in maths among boys in England, with a new high of 24% achieving grade 7 or above, while 20.5% of girls reached the same level. However, girls maintained their lead in top grades across all subjects, with 25.5% of their exam entries being awarded grade 7 or above compared with 20.7% of boys.
The proportion of exam results at the top grade, 9, remained at 5.2%, unchanged from 2025.
GCSEs in England award grades on a scale of 9 to 1, while many in Northern Ireland and Wales continue to award letter grades with A* at the peak. Education policy is devolved to UK national governments, making it difficult to directly compare GCSE results between them due to different content, marking and regulation.
In Northern Ireland 31.5% of entries by 16-year-olds gained A or grade 7 and above, a slight improvement over last year, while 84.4% gained C or grade 4 and above.
In Wales, 20.2% of grades for 16 year-olds were awarded A or better, and 63.7% of entries gained at least a C, slightly below the 2025 pass rate.
