—·School Leadership
The regional divide is the widest since 2010. It is not the biggest gap in these results.
London took 32.7% top grades, the North East 23.1%. Independent schools took 48.6% against the state sector’s 25.4% — a gap nearly two and a half times wider.
Written from the 2026 A Level results as reported by Tes, read on 20 August 2026. Every figure is attributed. Empower Educators is not affiliated with Tes, the Sutton Trust, the Northern Powerhouse Partnership or any examination board.
What the release showed
- 28.3%of A Level entries were awarded an A or A*, up from 28.1% last year
- 9.6points between London at 32.7% and the North East and East Midlands at 23.1% — the widest since 2010
- 23.2points between independent schools at 48.6% and state-funded schools at 25.4%
- 2regions beat the national average: London and the South East
A Level results 2026, as reported by Tes
The regional divide in A Level results widened again this summer. London took 32.7% of its entries at A or A*, the North East and the East Midlands 23.1% each, and the distance between them reached 9.6 points — up from 9.2 last year, and the widest since the current grading began in 2010. Only London and the South East finished above the national average of 28.3%. A Level results 2026, as reported by Tes
It was the story of the day, and it deserved to be. Henri Murison of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership called the widening disappointing; Nick Harrison of the Sutton Trust said a young person’s chances should not depend so heavily on which school they attend. Both are right.
But the same release contains a second gap, and it is more than twice the size.
Two gaps, one scale
Both are measured the same way — the share of entries awarded an A or A* — so they can be drawn on one axis. Almost no coverage prints them together.
By region 9.6 points
North East and East Midlands 23.1% London 32.7%
By school type 23.2 points
State-funded schools 25.4% Independent schools 48.6%
0%10%20%30%40%50%
The independent sector’s average sits 15.9 points above London’s. Not above the national average — above the strongest region in the country, by more than the entire distance between the best region and the worst. On these figures, the type of school a pupil attends does more work than the part of England it stands in.
The state sector is not one thing
Split it, and the spread inside it is wider than the regional gap that led the coverage.
| School type | A or A* |
|---|---|
| Free schools | 27% |
| Academies | 23.5% |
| Comprehensive secondaries | 23% |
| Secondary moderns | 22.4% |
Do not read that table as a ranking of school types. Secondary moderns exist almost entirely in selective areas, so their intake is defined by who was admitted elsewhere. Free schools are younger, smaller and more urban than the average. These are four different populations of pupils, not four qualities of school, and a table that looks like a league table is the fastest way to reach a wrong conclusion about your own.
The honest version is narrower and more useful: the sector a school sits in explains more of this data than the region does, and neither is in the gift of anybody reading this.
The pattern that repeats
One more thing worth carrying out of these figures. Boys took more top grades than girls — 28.9% at A or A* against 27.9%, the second year running. Girls took more passes at C and above: 79.4% against 76.6%.
Which is precisely what the GCSE results showed in maths the same week: boys ahead at the top of the paper, girls ahead at the boundary that decides what happens next. Two qualifications, two cohorts, one pattern. It is worth knowing which of those two numbers your own improvement plan is written about.
What a school can actually change
Not the region. Not the funding settlement, the intake, or the sector. A head of department in Sunderland cannot move any of the four numbers above, and an article that implies otherwise is asking them to feel responsible for something they were handed.
What is in their gift is ordinary time — and it is a larger resource than any of the interventions that get named on a school improvement plan.
Collective expertise is not a training day. It is what a department does with its ordinary time.
Trusted Leaders, Confident Schools
- 01 What does your ordinary time do? Not the training day. The forty minutes of a Tuesday department meeting, thirty-eight weeks a year, which is the largest professional development budget any department has and the least examined. Develop
- 02 Is the practice being held to account, or the person? The first can be discussed in front of the team and fixed by Friday. The second ends the conversation and costs you the next one. Challenge
- 03 Would your team tell you if it were not working? If the honest answer is no, every figure you collect for the rest of the year describes something other than what is happening in the rooms. Connect
The gap you can move
None of this makes the regional divide unimportant. It is real, it widened, and the people arguing about it are arguing about something that matters to hundreds of thousands of young people.
But it is not the gap in front of you. The one in front of you is the distance between your strongest teacher and your third strongest, in the same building, teaching the same specification to the same intake. That gap is nobody’s to close but yours, and it is the only one on this page that will have moved by next August.