Girls now less likely than boys to get top grades, but remain more likely to go to university

While the percentage of students getting top grades increased overall, it fell among girls.

Traditionally, a big part of this sort of article - getting behind the data on exam results - would have focused on trying to understand the inevitable fact that girls perform better than boys in the education system.

The Education Committee even launched an inquiry into the phenomenon two years ago. That summer, girls outperformed boys, in terms of getting As or A*s in their A-levels, by more than 10 percentage points.

Last year, boys closed the gap, narrowly overtaking girls for the first time on record. This year, they widened it. Boys continued to improve, while girls continued to do worse.

Girls are still more likely to do A-levels than boys, and more likely to go on to university. That gap has remained relatively static in the 10 years for which we have data, although it is technically closer this year than it has been before.

The pattern is repeated across all ethnicities, but the gap is noticeably closer among Asian boys and girls compared with those from a white or black background.

The gap is larger for boys from a more deprived background, however. Girls from the most deprived parts of the country are almost 50% more likely to go to university than boys with the same background.

So there are about six girls from deprived areas at university for every four boys from similar places. The ratio halves when you get to people from the least deprived areas, so there are more like five boys for every six girls.

People from the least deprived places are still almost twice as likely to go to university compared with those from the most deprived areas, however.

People studying at fee-paying schools were almost twice as likely to secure top grades at A-level compared with those from state-funded schools.

Do boys pick easier subjects?

There are massive differences in terms of which subjects are favoured by girls or boys. Almost three times as many boys picked to study further maths at A-level compared with girls, for example. For English language, the ratios are reversed.

The differences among smaller subjects - electronics, in favour of boys, and health & social care, for girls - are even more pronounced. Eighteen girls take the health & social care (double award) A-level for every one boy.

Further maths might not be typically understood as a soft or easy subject, but almost six in 10 people studying it get As or A*s.

That's more than double the average for all subjects, and top out of all 24 courses, with more than 7,500 people studying them.

For English language students, in comparison, one of the courses most favoured by girls, just over one in 10 pupils get a top grade.

That's the lowest rate of all the most popular subjects, although girls do slightly outperform the few boys who do take it.

Are boys more likely to take technical qualifications?

New Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said that he wants Britain to "value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap", putting technical education on equal footing with the traditional academic path in the education system.

Part of the reason for this focus is to respond to the number of 16-24 year olds who are not in education, employment or training (known as NEETs).

There were more than a million as of the latest data from May 2026, and young men have been more likely to be NEET than young women since the COVID pandemic.

The previous government attempted to move focus towards technical training with the introduction of T-levels, launched in 2020.

They are described as being equivalent to three A-levels, taken over two years after GCSEs, in the same way that A-levels are. A key part of the qualification is that students partake in at least 45 days of work in industry.

T-level take-up had been slow initially, not helped by the fact that the introduction coincided with COVID, when the ability to secure on-the-job experience became significantly more difficult in many sectors.

Encouragingly, the number of people getting results for T-levels today is 65% higher than last year. The overall numbers remain relatively low, however.

There were 19,665 T-level results compared with more than 900,000 A-levels. Even accounting for the fact that each T-evel is equivalent to three A-levels, this is still a massive gap.

The gender split is only slightly in favour of boys, but this is notable given that the alternative - A-levels - skews so heavily towards girls.

Again, some subjects heavily favour girls over boys, and vice-versa. Education and early years is the most popular T-level, with 3,780 people taking it - 3,614 girls but just 157 boys.

Among the 1,649 people taking design and development for engineering and manafacturing, 1,504 were boys.

There were also more than 300,000 vocational and technical qualifications delivered this year. The gender splits for these are not available.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

(c) Sky News 2026: Girls now less likely than boys to get top grades, but remain more likely to go to university