Geography

Geography has the smallest disadvantage gap of any subject at GCSE. At A Level, that pattern reverses.

Tes analysed Ofqual’s subject entries by deprivation for the first time, the exam regulator’s first year publishing results at local authority level. Behind geography’s reversal sits a supply number nobody connected to it: trainee teachers for the subject, nearly halved in a single year.

Empower Educators 1 September 2026 6 min read

Written from a Tes exclusive published this morning, 1 September 2026, and the Department for Education’s own trainee-teacher statistics, read from the published table. Every figure is attributed below. Empower Educators is not affiliated with Tes, Ofqual, the Royal Geographical Society, the Geographical Association or the Sutton Trust.

Close-up of a world globe angled to show Europe, in soft focus with the mounting arm visible at the top of the frame

Tes published an exclusive this morning: the first analysis of Ofqual’s subject entry data broken down by deprivation, using local authority figures the regulator has only just started publishing on results day. Students in England’s least deprived areas are three times as likely to take GCSE PE or drama as students in the most deprived areas, and similar gaps run through music, food preparation and nutrition, design and technology, and the three separate sciences. Tes, 1 September 2026, analysing Ofqual subject entry data by local authority

Geography is in that report too, and it does not fit the pattern. Its GCSE gap is the smallest of any subject named in the analysis. Its A Level gap is not.

The smallest gap, and where it goes

At GCSE, 24% of pupils in the most deprived areas of England take geography, against 30% in the least deprived — a six-point gap, and proportionally the narrowest in the whole report. At A Level the raw gap is smaller still, four points: 7% against 11%. Read only the points, and geography looks like it is closing.

GCSE 6 points

Most deprived 24% Least deprived 30%

A Level 4 points

Most deprived 7% Least deprived 11%

0%10%20%30%

Entry rate by deprivation band, both levels on one scale. The point gap falls from six to four. The proportion does the opposite: 30 divided by 24 is 1.25 times; 11 divided by 7 is 1.57 times. Both figures are published; the division is the only arithmetic here.

Tes puts it more simply:

The divide is 7 per cent versus 11 per cent at A Level, but the correlation between affluence and geography is stronger at post-16.
Tes, 1 September 2026

Two people who run the subject nationally told Tes what they think causes that.

Two explanations, from the people who run the subject

Dr Catherine Souch, director of research, education and professional at the Royal Geographical Society, told Tes that the GCSE gap has narrowed over the past decade, partly because the EBacc and Progress 8 gave more schools a reason to offer geography at all. Steve Brace, chief executive of the Geographical Association, agreed that GCSE has genuinely become more diverse — and said that progress is largely lost at the transition to A Level. Both named the same three suspects: teacher shortages, limits on which subjects a school can actually timetable, and pupils who are unsure what a geography A Level leads to. Tes, 1 September 2026

The first of those three has a number attached to it, and it is not a small one.

The number behind the shortage

The Department for Education’s own trainee-teacher statistics, published 27 July 2026, show 466 accepted offers onto geography teacher training courses starting this autumn. At the same point in the previous recruitment cycle, the figure was 903. The pipeline supplying the specialists needed to run a small sixth-form geography group has been cut by almost half in a single year. DfE, Initial teacher training: monthly statistics, 27 July 2026, Table 9.1

Last cycle

903

This cycle

466

Accepted offers onto secondary geography ITT courses, by recruitment cycle. A fall of 48.4% — not quite halved, but close enough that “nearly halved” is the honest description.

Kevin Latham, research and policy manager at the Sutton Trust, made the general version of this point to Tes about disadvantaged schools across every subject in the report: they are less likely to have specialist-trained teachers, which is “likely to impact the availability of subject options” at both GCSE and A Level. A national shortfall does not land evenly. A school already short of specialists loses the option first, and a small A Level group is the first casualty of a shortage that a large GCSE cohort can absorb. Tes, 1 September 2026, quoting Kevin Latham, the Sutton Trust

The rest of the report

Geography is one finding inside a much larger investigation, and the other subjects deserve their own numbers rather than a footnote. Six more, all GCSE, from the same analysis:

Entry rate by deprivation band, GCSE, most to least deprived
Subject	Most deprived	Least deprived	Ratio
GCSE PE	4%	12.5%	3.1x
GCSE drama	2.4%	6.9%	2.9x
GCSE food prep & nutrition	3.2%	7.7%	2.4x
GCSE design & technology	2%	4.4%	2.2x
GCSE music	4.9%	9.9%	2.0x
GCSE separate sciences	~12.5%	~20%	1.6x

Ratios are least-deprived divided by most-deprived, rounded to one decimal place. Combined science, unlike every separate science, was flat across all four bands at 44–46% — the one subject in the whole report with no measurable gap.

Tes is careful about reading this as destiny rather than pattern: Slough, in the most deprived quartile in England on the government’s own income deprivation index, recorded a 29% separate-science entry rate, well above affluent Fareham’s 8%. A national average by deprivation band describes a pattern, not any one school’s ceiling. Tes, 1 September 2026

Geography’s A Level reversal is not a fluke unique to one subject, either. The same analysis found the same direction in design & technology, French and business studies, all more commonly taken in less deprived areas at A Level. Law is the one clear exception — entries roughly twice as high in the most deprived areas as the least, the only subject in the report where affluence runs the other way. Whatever is happening to subject choice between GCSE and A Level, geography is one case of a pattern, not an outlier. Tes, 1 September 2026

What a geography department still controls

None of the causes named above are in a department’s gift. Nobody in a geography office can train more specialists this term or rewrite Progress 8. But two things sit entirely inside the building, and they are the two the department can act on while the national picture is somebody else’s to fix.

Every board requires fieldwork and every board examines it in the written papers, on data the student has never seen before. A department that organises the fieldwork well and prepares for its examination hardly at all is spending its scarcest resource — the trip itself — on the part of the qualification that earns the least reliably. And geography looks like the most modular subject on the timetable, which is exactly why so many schemes of work are a rotation of topics rather than a built sequence: the dependencies are real, and a department that treats physical and human geography as interchangeable content is reteaching the same concepts every year instead of building on them.

Four questions, none of which need a recruitment figure to answer

The national picture — the shortage, the funding, the accountability system — is somebody else’s to fix. These four are not.

1 Six months after a fieldwork day, could a pupil say what it taught them? Every board examines fieldwork on data the student has never seen. If the honest answer is the day itself rather than a transferable skill, the trip was well organised and badly prepared for.
2 Which A Level topics quietly depend on a GCSE case study? Physical and human geography get taught as interchangeable topics more often than they should. If a Year 12 module assumes a case study most of the group forgot two years ago, that is a curriculum gap, not a revision gap.
3 If your specialist left in September, who runs the A Level group in October? The specialists to answer that question are getting scarcer nationally. A department that has never asked it locally has no idea how exposed it actually is.
4 Do the pupils choosing options know what geography leads to? Both subject bodies named career uncertainty as a reason GCSE gains do not survive to A Level. That is a conversation a department can have in Year 9, before the options form goes out.

The third is the one that matters most this year, and it is the only one on the list that most departments have never actually asked out loud.

A subject cannot fix its own trainee pipeline. A department that already knows who teaches the A Level group if its specialist leaves in September has done the one thing this year’s recruitment figures cannot do for it.