Overall picture

302,706 students sat GCSE Geography exams in 2025 - this is up from 297,411 in 2024 (an increase of 1.75%).

AQA are the largest awarding body for GCSE Geography, with 66.8% of students across the UK sitting this examination in comparison to the other exam boards. 202,253 sat the AQA specification in 2025 (up from 196,235 in 2024) – the next largest exam board was Edexcel with 47,912 entries (spilt between the A and B specs).

The proportions of students reaching 4+ and 7+ are in line with previous years - 25.2% of students gained 7+ (up from 24.9% in 2024) and 65.7% gained 4+ (a slight increase on 65.6% in 2024).

You can see how this varies between exam boards below...

Proportion of GCSE Geography grades by exam board (cumulative %)

Gender split

Boys make up 54.3% of all entries across all exam boards for GCSE Geography, compared to 45.7% girls. However, girls out-perform boys with 28.1% of girls gaining Grade 7 or above, compared to 22.7% of boys. They also out-perform at Grade 4 and above too - with 67.1% of girls gaining this, compared to 64% of boys.

Grade boundaries

Grade boundaries increased across all boards in 2024 - however this year we have not seen the same amount of movement - in fact for AQA, there has been a small decrease at the top end...

AQA GCSE Geography grade boundaries

Let's have a look at how this compares to the other exam boards...

GCSE Geography grade boundaries by exam specification

And here are the component breakdown grade boundaries for AQA...

Lessons learned from the examiner reports

When I was a full time teacher and head of department I am not sure I fully appreciated the importance of the examiner feedback reports that are published on results day - with the never-ending list of things to do, sitting down and reading the reports in detail just didn't happen. The problem is that the reports tend to be very detailed and often a bit unwieldy, meaning that many teachers who have good intentions, never actually find the time to read them properly.

However, the examiner reports are a really useful tool to help inform your teaching, and in particular where to focus your efforts on - and are a great tool to use in department meetings to ensure that everyone knows which parts of the papers students are tripping up on. Last year AQA started to include example answers and examiner commentary which makes them more useful than ever as part of your department CPD.

And like last year I will be publishing summaries of the reports for the 3 AQA papers next week. I am hoping that by highlighting key comments and breaking them down into manageable chunks, they will become much more accessible for all.