How well did students in England and Wales do in their A-Levels?

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00:00Hello, my name is Amber Allett, and I'm a journalist specialising in education.

00:04The 2025 A-level results day is finally here, meaning hundreds of thousands of young people

00:10across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland can finally find out how they did in their exams,

00:15and which of these important qualifications they've managed to earn. But as well as celebrating

00:20individual success, how the country's young people did overall can help to paint a broader

00:25picture of student achievement. Here are a few of the key figures from this year's results.

00:33Firstly, the amount of top A and A-star grades awarded this year has risen a little on last year.

00:39The very highest grade alone, the A-star, was awarded to 9.4% of all A-level entries.

00:45While this is just a 0.1 percentage point increase on last year, this does still represent a record

00:51high, outside of the years that special pandemic measures were in place. The overall pass rate,

00:57or the amount of entries that got any passing grade from A-star down to E, has also gone up,

01:02reaching 97.5% this year. Most students took about three different A-level subjects,

01:09representing about two out of three in England alone. Mathematics remained the most popular

01:14subject, taken by about 112,000 students. But other STEM subjects are also rising up the ranks,

01:21with physics jumping from 9th to 6th place this year, and the amount of students taking economics

01:27shooting up by 5.5%. Others, however, appear to be seeing a dip in popularity, despite remaining in

01:34the top subjects overall. These include history, which has seen entries full 5.5%, psychology, art and design,

01:42and sociology.