How many GCSEs do kids take these days?

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DS will choose his options next week, and we have only just been sent information home on this. DD chose her’s 4 years ago (same school) and did 11 GCSEs, but DS has been told pupils only do 8 now. This is obviously fewer than he was expecting to be able to choose, and he is worried about how this will affect his future prospects. Am I right in thinking that 8 GCSEs for a top set pupil is a rather low number?

If an individual school mandates those 8, then yes, its over restrictve. But many don't. DD has 6 compulsory, 3 choices for example

@meuntilmarch2025 but it seems some selective schools are also cutting down a bit. There's always the option to take more outside of school, as happens with some students with a different mother tongue.

Who is mandating those? Schools are. I actually don't know any schools that mandate all those.

The only actually compulsory ones are Eng Lang, Maths and Science. Schools come up with their own list of compulsory extras for a variety of reasons. My own DC had to do eng X2, maths, triple or combined science, a language and a humanity. That left two free choices out of quite a range.

As with many schools, the triple science took up the same space on the timetable as combined so still 2 free slots.

Where schools have 9, there will always be at least 1 free choice. RS is usually only compulsory in Church schools. Not all enforce a language anymore. there should be scope to choose a creative subject….although lots of schools do t offer so many due to funding cuts. These are expensive classes to run, with smaller numbers, expensive resources etc.

A school offering 9 is unlikely to have the full list of compulsory subjects listed…as there is then zero choice.

It is all about balancing competing demands of range of choice, cost, typical outcomes that arise from studying fewer/more subjects.

The very able who take 8/9 subjects and score very highly have pretty much all options available to them and go onto do as well as people who have done 10/11. In fact, in most cases, the reasonably able will gain better grades in the subjects taken if they do 8/9 than 10/11. Given schools are dealing with large numbers of students and looking to maximise outcomes, they have to think about their cohort and maximising the outcomes of their cohort. In mixed ability schools, this won’t usually be offering 10/11 subjects. Even in selective schools, it increasingly isn’t seen as the best offering for able students. Independent schools with their extra resourcing might be able to offer more flexibility where some do 8/9/10/11 and adjust the number through the GCSE years. But this is hugely expensive to offer as students at this age need timetabling all the time. State schools and many independents won’t be able to fund such an individually tailored approach. So most end up having to choose from a number and range which will deliver best outcomes for the majority in that particular setting.

Lots of schools only offer nine; in fact I believe the average is lower than that.

There are lots of reasons, as detailed on this thread tbh.

While I am not a fan of very small numbers of GCSE, I agree with @minisnowballs that perhaps we are overly concerned about closing options for A level.

The main A levels you need the GCSE for are maths, sciences, MFL, English. Tbh history and maybe geog can be done without, as can music if you play externally (which you would need to for A level), drama, sociology, RS, psychology, PE I would say, CS for sure. Maybe tech is best done following GCSE.

Only 9 covers a lot of content.
DD took 10, but that was just before they reformed the GCSEs.

I think 8 does restrict variety. However with the current GCSEs 8 is imo still a lot for less able kids. More subjects for everyone => less content per subject.

Just want to say I've found this thread really useful and informative!

Our DS, in a Welsh medium state school got 12 GCSEs plus additional maths.

2 GCSEs were done entirely in year 10, one of the maths was taken in the summer of year 10 and November of year 11 and the rest were taken in the summer of year 11.

My daughter has 1 IGCSE, plus functional skills maths levels 1 and 2.
She is currently 2nd year competitive university, high achieving.
There are various routes through the education system.
She has also had no problem getting into employment to help fund university.

Yes. We live with the current specifications which are very content and exam heavy.
In the part, with less content, more coursework, fewer exams (and also more funding to schools) it was more manageable to offer and be successful in more subjects.

If you’ve watched kids preparing for full sets of mocks or their GCSEs in recent years, since the curriculum was reformed, you’ll see them wading through unmanageable quantities of material and in mocks, doing 3 exams per day, and in real exams doing a couple most days for 6 weeks. You’ll see exams which are so content heavy that to get 9s in many subjects, only percentages in the 60s/low 70s are needed, because it’s too hard to get far in excess of this even for able students. It shows the exams as they stand are not really good exams. But thry are the system we live with and schools have to set students up to succeed. One part of is offering the ‘right’ amount and range of options. It won’t suit everyone, but most can only fit a one or two-size fit-all range of option possibilities, fo suit their cohort. And they have to look to optimise overall outcomes.

Anyone whose children did GCSE's before 2018 can't compare with the situation now. The content & difficulty, especially for subjects such as maths & science increased a lot. Many schools who used to offer 10-12 GCSE's cut it down to 8-10, even top performing selective schools.

Good summary @WombatChocolate

Yes this! My DC fell into both camps and the number of exams and amount of content DS2 had to cover was a lot more. He took 10 inc triple science and it was a lot. Not saying no one should take 10, but those saying their DC took 13 and it was fine - was that in England and in 2018 or later?

@WombatChocolate puts this well.

DD1 waded through vast numbers of exams in summer of 2023 - it felt never-ending. She got high grades - but in some subjects where she now has an 8, for example, (looking at you, physics) the grade boundaries were so low that I really wouldn't say she'd achieved that grade by understanding what she'd written.

She was very organised and therefore did well. But it felt brutal - and the essays themselves were such tick box exercises- it was all about how to pick up a point here, and another there. And by the time they took the GCSEs they'd done three full sets of mocks, which didn't leave a lot of time for teaching. So she had more variety in terms of the subjects she took, but I don't think she learned to love any of them. I suspect it is no coincidence that her favourite subject is one she didn't take at GCSE at all (A-Level politics).

Maybe I should feel that DD2 is getting fewer life chances than her sister by only doing eight, but at the moment it feels like the world has opened up for her because the burden of too many gcses was taken away.

Ds1 did his GCSEs two years ago. He took 12, the same number ds2 is doing this year, in his state comprehensive academy. Perhaps some schools just aren't as ambitious as others but it's not an outrageous number.

I am not sure how one would define "outrageous" in this context, but it is certainly highly unusual. If you look at the actual data, last year only 390 pupils, 0.1% of the total who entered GCSEs, sat 12 or more subjects at one sitting in England.

I must have something wrong, it's too unlikely they would have landed in such a small group. There are 8 GCSEs just with the Maths, English and Science subjects alone, Geography, Comp Science, Foreign language and I'm beginning to think their last subject, performing arts, must fall under another qualification - but it's easily the most time intensive of them all.

Mine did 12 which was excessive in my mind. Surely 5 with good grades including English and maths should suffice

How is maths english and science eight GCSEs? It's six or even five if taking double science.

Maths, statistics, further maths, Eng Lang, Eng Lit, Physics, Biology Chemistry.

Yeps that us a lot. I don’t know, as none of mine did it, how much extra work there is in the two extra maths GCSEs. Most DC don’t take either of those tbf. I’d expect them just to be for maths whizzes and perhaps as an option, so I think your DCs school is an outlier for sure.

Having 8/9 GCSEs at the very best grades a student can achieve when doing a slightly smaller curriculum stands then in better stead for uni places and work etc than having done more subjects and got lower grades across the board.

I don't think anyone is advocating for lower grades as a desirable outcome. There are arguments for and against DD's school's approach of doing more across 3 years instead of fewer across 2 years. But 8 does seem restrictive for DC who could do well across the board in 9,10 or 11 subjects.

My own DC had to do eng X2, maths, triple or combined science, a language and a humanity. That left two free choices out of quite a range.

That's a total of 9 though. With a max of 8, they would only have had one choice. So they could only ever do one from art, music, drama, PE, design, a second language or a second humanity. They couldn't do both art and music, or music and a second language, or geography/history/RE, or economics/history/product design, or history/RE/art or both music and drama etc etc. Endless subject combinations that are appealing and make sense but are impossible.

At that school with 8 max, so one free choice, DD would have missed out on a second language, history, economics, drama and additional maths. She enjoyed and got a lot out of all of those. And she needed two of them to progress to the A levels she ended up doing.

I understand the argument that many DC are better off doing 8, but feel it's a shame when it's compulsory for those who could manage without such a narrow curriculum. Doing 9 or 10 also allows DC to really stand out if applying to universities who care about GCSEs.

And I get the "they only need 5" argument, but surely education is about a bit more than just the bare minimum required for the next stage.

Which makes compulsory RE even more bonkers.

Why are they even offering maths + further maths + statistics at GCSE? That’s too much maths!