Rise in GCSE top awards is a testament to the resilience of pupils and credit to schools

All the young people who worked hard deserve praise and as they mark the start of a new chapter in their lives.

Pupils experienced unprecedented levels of disruption earlier in their time at secondary school as a result of the pandemic. Bearing that in mind, the steady GCSE performance is to be seen as a win.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson rightly praised this cohort of students – who moved from primary to secondary school in the middle of the pandemic – for showing “remarkable resilience”.

A great deal of credit must also go to the teachers who have worked in the most testing of circumstances to maintain attainment levels.

However, regional inequalities continue to blight the education sector and are hard to ignore. The proportion of GCSE entries awarded the top grades of 7 or higher was 18.4 per cent in Yorkshire. While this was broadly similar to last year’s performance and better than in 2019, the region still lags behind London which registered 28.4 per cent. That is a far too big of a gap to ignore.

The result of this gap is that young people in the region are set at a disadvantage before they’ve even stepped foot into the world of full-time work.

The overall GCSE pass rate did fall by 0.2 per cent but as Sir Ian Bauckham, chief regulator at Ofqual, England’s exams regulator, says, the differences are “natural variation” that would be seen between any year.

London and the South East may have seen larger year-on-year falls in the GCSE pass rate, grade 4 or above, than all other regions but Yorkshire is still lagging behind.

It isn’t about bringing down other regions but rather levelling up education in this region.