Provision of GCSE Subjects 2021. Statistics Report Series No. 134

This report looks at the provision of GCSE subjects in England in 2021. Provision in a GCSE subject is defined as the number or percentage of schools with at least one student taking the subject. This may not cover all of the actual 'provision' since schools might offer to provide a subject, but none of their students wants to study it. This report was produced using publicly available data from the Department for Education's (DfE) "Find and compare schools in England" service. The dataset consisted of Key Stage 4 (KS4) entry numbers for all GCSE subjects in each school in England. Other school information, such as schools' sex composition, school type, and admissions policy were also available. However, some data (available in previous years) was not available in the 2021 dataset, including GCSE grades achieved and the percentage of disadvantaged students in each school. The decision was made to use data (for these tables only) from the 2019 data set. The report presents only the provision of GCSE subjects in schools with students taking GCSEs in 2021. Only GCSEs (9-1) full course (both single and double award) were counted for this report. Schools with at least 10 students taking GCSEs were included in the analysis. In this report, the level of provision is presented by the following school classifications: school type, school attainment, school deprivation level, school sex composition, and school size. However, it should be noted that the analysis is at the simplest level and takes no account of interactions between these classifications.