Same exam, different starting lines: what A-level results tell us about educational inequality

Every August, A-level results day produces the same familiar images: teenagers tearing open envelopes, vox pops of devastated or thrilled young people and Jeremy Clarkson crowing that he left his privileged school with no A-Levels thank you and is now living the life of Riley. Regular as clockwork.

We like to think of the letters our young people recieve as a straightforward measure of individual achievement. Everyone sits the same exams; everyone is judged against the same mark schemes.

But look beyond the national averages and a more uncomfortable picture emerges.

In 2026, 28.3% of A-level grades in England were awarded at A or A*. In London, the figure was 32.7%. In the North East, it was around 23%. The regional gap between the highest- and lowest-performing parts of England has grown substantially since before the pandemic.

The divide by school type is more striking still. More than half of A-level entries at independent schools received an A or A*, compared with around 27% at comprehensive schools and 26% at further education and sixth-form colleges.

These figures raise a difficult question. If young people are sitting the same examinations, why should where they live (and the type of school they attend) be so closely associated with the grades they receive?

The answer is not that teenagers in London work harder than teenagers in the North East, nor that privately educated pupils are inherently more able. It is that A-level results are the final stage of an educational journey in which advantages and disadvantages have been accumulating for years.

The gap starts long before A-levels

It is tempting to look for the explanation inside sixth forms. Perhaps some have better teachers, smaller classes or stronger leadership. The truth is that by the time pupils begin A-levels, much of the attainment gap already exists.

Research from the Education Policy Institute and Education Endowment Foundation has found that disadvantaged children are already around 4.6 months behind their peers by the end of Reception. The gap then grows as children progress through school.

By ages 16 to 19, prior attainment, particularly performance at GCSE, explains a substantial proportion of the disadvantage gap. That changes the way we should think about A-level inequality. A disappointing result at 18 may have roots in what happened at eight, or even at four. A child who starts school behind, struggles with reading, attends an overstretched secondary school and reaches GCSEs without having caught up does not suddenly arrive in Year 12 with a clean educational slate. The disadvantage has accumulated.

Poverty follows children into the classroom

Schools cannot insulate pupils completely from the circumstances in which they grow up.

A teenager living in an overcrowded home may have nowhere quiet to revise. A family struggling financially may not be able to pay for tutoring. Poor health, insecure housing and caring responsibilities can affect attendance.

Persistent absence is particularly important. Missing school inevitably means missing teaching, but absence itself is often a symptom of deeper problems rather than simply a lack of motivation.

This is why regional education gaps cannot be separated neatly from regional economic inequality. Some communities have experienced decades of weaker employment, poorer health outcomes and lower investment. Asking schools alone to compensate for all of those disadvantages is asking an enormous amount of teachers and headteachers. Education policy matters. But so do housing, health, transport and family income.

Why does London do so well?

London complicates the story because it shows that deprivation does not automatically produce poor educational results. The capital contains considerable poverty and educates large numbers of disadvantaged children, yet consistently performs strongly. There is unlikely to be one explanation.

What London has benefited from is sustained efforts to improve schools, including the legacy of the London Challenge. It also has a large labour market from which schools can recruit teachers, as well as higher teacher pay to reflect the cost of living. Researchers have also pointed to London’s distinctive demographics, including the performance and aspirations of some ethnic-minority and immigrant communities.

Perhaps the important lesson is that regional inequality is not inevitable…if London can combine substantial social disadvantage with strong educational outcomes, the question should be what elements of that success can realistically be reproduced elsewhere.

What about private schools?

The private/state divide is even more politically charged. The headline figure is certainly dramatic: around half of independent-school A-level entries achieved A or A* in 2026.

But we should be careful about what that statistic proves. It does not tell us that simply placing a child in a private school causes them to achieve top grades.

Independent schools educate a highly unusual section of the population. Their pupils disproportionately come from families able to spend many thousands of pounds each year on education. Those families may also be able to provide private tutoring, books, technology, extracurricular activities and quiet places to study. Parents may have greater knowledge of universities and professional careers and be better positioned to navigate the education system. These schools themselves can offer significant advantages too: extensive facilities, specialist teachers, strong university preparation and, in some cases, smaller classes and more individual attention.

There is also selection.

Academically selective state schools perform extremely strongly as well. In 2026, around 40% of A-level entries in selective maintained schools achieved A or A*. That doesn’t eliminate the private/state gap. But it tells us something important: Exam results reflect not only what schools do to children after they arrive. They also reflect which children arrive at those schools, the advantages they bring with them and the resources surrounding them outside school.

Same exam, different starting lines

For me, this is the fundamental problem with treating A-level results as though they were simply a national competition. The exam may be standardised but childhood is not.

One pupil may have attended excellent schools since Reception, had specialist teachers in every subject, received private tutoring before GCSEs and grown up surrounded by adults who attended university. Another may have changed schools several times, experienced teacher shortages, lived in temporary accommodation and become the first person in their family to consider higher education.

At 18, we put the same examination paper in front of both of them. The assessment may be equal. The journey to the examination hall plainly is not.

This echoes my own journey through A-Levels. I was homeless, working night shifts to pay my own way, with absolutely no support from home. At the time I had a boyfriend with middle class parents, where the biggest thing he had to worry about was United winning at the weekend. I bombed my A-Levels and while I cried into my results slip, wondering what an earth I was going to do now, he whined that he was one mark off an A in business. Our journeys were not the same.

So what can we actually do about it?

There is no single policy capable of eliminating these gaps. That is partly because waiting until sixth form is far too late. If disadvantaged children are already behind at five, high-quality early-years education must be part of the solution. Investment at that stage may be less politically visible than announcing a new initiative for teenagers, but preventing gaps from opening is easier than trying to close them 12 years later.

Schools serving disadvantaged communities also need the resources to attract and retain excellent teachers - particularly in shortage subjects such as maths and physics, where schools in less affluent areas can struggle to recruit specialists. Financial incentives can help, but teachers also need manageable workloads, professional development and compelling reasons to build careers in the communities that need them most.

Attendance requires similar thinking. Governments should certainly expect children to attend school, but punishment alone cannot solve absence caused by poor mental or physical health, unmet special educational needs, transport problems or instability at home. Tackling absence means understanding why individual children are absent.

And support cannot disappear at 16.

Disadvantage does not end when a teenager finishes their GCSEs. Sixth forms and further education colleges educating large numbers of poorer students need sufficient funding for academic interventions, tutoring, careers advice and university preparation. I had no help whatsoever and to be honest, nobody seemed to care as I was deemed to be an adult.

Universities have a role too. Contextual admissions - considering an applicant’s achievements alongside the circumstances in which they were achieved - recognise a simple reality: identical grades do not necessarily represent identical educational journeys.

But schools cannot fix poverty

There is a danger in every discussion about educational inequality and it's making leading a school a job people don't want to touch with a bargepole - identifying a social problem and handing it to schools.

Teachers are expected to close attainment gaps, improve attendance, address mental health problems, identify safeguarding concerns, teach children about relationships, prepare them for employment and somehow compensate for poverty at the same time. I couldn't even read that back without becoming breathless. Schools can transform lives. Exceptional teachers do so every day. But there are limits to what happens inside a classroom.

A serious attempt to close regional education gaps therefore has to extend beyond the Department for Education. It involves reducing child poverty, improving housing, providing effective health and SEND services and creating stronger regional economies. Otherwise we risk repeatedly measuring educational inequality while doing too little about the conditions that produce it.

What should success look like?

The objective should not be to make every school or region produce identical A-level results. Nor should it be to bring successful private schools, grammar schools or London schools down in the name of equality. It should be to bring everyone else up.

We should want excellent schools to remain excellent while making the conditions that enable their pupils to flourish much less exceptional. That means asking a different question on results day. Instead of simply celebrating the number of A*s, we should ask how accurately we could have predicted those grades years earlier simply by knowing a child’s family income, postcode and school. The less accurately we can make that prediction, the closer we will be to genuine educational opportunity.

A-levels are designed to measure what young people know and can do. The examinations may be the same, the mark schemes may be the same and the grades printed on the certificates may be the same. But the children sitting them have spent 18 years arriving at the examination hall by profoundly different routes. Until those routes become fairer, results day will continue to tell us about much more than academic achievement. It will tell us about inequality.