Schoolchildren in London are starting to drastically outperform their peers around the rest of the country, today's GCSE results show.
The gap has widened between the proportion of GCSE entries in London awarded the top grades and those in both northern England and the Midlands, exam results show.
London leads with top grades
Some 28.6% of entries in the capital received grade 7 or above this year, up from 28.4% in 2025 and the highest for any region in England.
North-east England had the lowest figure, with 17.7% of entries awarded at least a 7, down from 17.8% last year.
It means the gap between these two regions now stands at 10.9 percentage points, up from 10.6 in 2025 and the largest since the start of available data in 2010.
Gender gap narrows to slowest point this century
Girls have also continued to out-perform boys, although the longstanding gap between the two genders has narrowed to its slowest point this century.
Overall, nearly a quarter (24.4%) of girls' GCSE entries were awarded at least a grade 7/A compared with almost a fifth of boys' entries (19.6%): a 4.8 percentage point gap, down from a difference of 5.1 last year.
A total of 70.2% of girls' GCSE entries were awarded at least a grade 4/C compared with 64.4% of boys' entries – a 5.8 percentage point gap, a decrease from 6.2 last year. These are the narrowest leads enjoyed by girls since at least 2000, which is the earliest archive data available.
