A-level results 2024: North-south divide persists in top results in England

Hazel Shearing
Education correspondent

There’s been no change in the top 10 most-popular subjects this year.

But maths is the real winner – not only is it still the most popular subject, it’s also the first A-level to ever surpass more than 100,000 entries.

Across all subjects with more than 10,000 entries, further maths saw the biggest increase in uptake, followed by physics, computing, maths and then English literature.

(Entries to computing, by the way, have grown 83.1% since 2019.)

A report last week by the National Foundation for Educational Research, commissioned by the British Academy, suggested the range of subjects young people are studying after the age of 16 has narrowed.

It said there had been a particular decline in uptake of arts and humanities subjects, with 38% of sixth-form students studying a humanities subject in 2021-22, compared to around 60% in 2016.

All of this will ring alarm bells for universities trying to recruit enough students to keep arts and humanities subjects open.