Overall picture

This year 34,336 students sat A-Level Geography (across 4 exam boards) and we have seen a grade distribution for geography which is almost identical to last year's (as you can see in the graph below).

98.6% of geography entries were A*- E (compared to 98.3% in 2024). 6.3% were A*, and 18.5% were grade A - this is exactly the same as last year so almost a quarter of entries scored A*/A.

By exam board

AQA was the most popular of the A-Level specifications with 13,070 sitting it this year - this is 38.1% of entries, however it is closely followed by Edexcel with 12,789 candidates, making 37.2% of the share. The other two exam boards have much lower numbers - OCR had 4,595 candidates and Eduqas 1,115.

Results vary by exam board as you can see in this table...

Gender balance

It is worth noting though that Geography is still relatively gender balanced with 53% entrants being male this year, compared to 47% - this gender gap has narrowed slightly from last year (54.1% vs 45.9%). Whereas in other social sciences subjects there is a much bigger difference - over 70% of entrants for Sociology, Psychology and RE are female, with over 60% for History.

However, there is a considerable difference in achievement by gender with 31.3% of girls achieving A*-A compared to 18.5% of boys...

Grade boundaries

In terms of grade boundaries, we have seen a little bit of movement, but this varies between specifications...

Geography entries

Total A-Level entries were slightly down on last year - 882,509, compared to 886,514 entries in 2024 (-0.45%), which follows two years of increasing entries. According to data from Ofqual, these A‑Level entries corresponded to 313,190 students sitting A‑Level exams across 137 different subjects.

However, Geography has once again dropped in popularity - 34,336 sat the exam this year (a drop of 5.4% from 2024) accounting for 3.9% of all entries (down from 4.1% last year). Entries for Geography in 2024 also saw a decrease from 2023.

In 2023 Geography dropped out of the top ten most popular subjects, and is now the 12th most popular A‑Level subject overall in 2025. Last year also saw Geography entering the top ten subjects with the sharpest declines, taking the 3rd place spot. This year it ranks in 5th place in that same list. However, the decline in geography entries reflects a wider downward trend among humanities and social science subjects, with similar decreases also observed in History, Psychology, and others.

Once again we need to think about how and what we teach at GCSE and how this affects A-Level numbers, but also shows the real need to be promoting career links in Geography as there are many fantastic careers that our subject can lead to. And of course, we also need to consider the impact of Geography teacher retention and how having non-specialists teaching GCSE might affect these numbers.

The top A-Level subject increases for 2025 are:

1. Further Mathematics (up by 7.2%)
2. Economics (up by 5.2%)
3. Mathematics (up by 4.4%)
4. Physics (up by 4.3%)
5. Chemistry (up by 1.5%)