Health Equity North Directors statement: Regional inequalities in A-Level results

Today (Thursday 14th August, 2025) students all over the UK are receiving their A-Level results, with average grades having risen since 2024. However, there are still regional disparities in results:

“While today’s headlines celebrate the overall rise in top A-Level grades, we are disheartened to see that the gap between the highest and lowest performing regions in England has widened yet again. In London, 32.1% of grades were marked at A or A*, compared with just 22.9% in the North East – a 9.2 percentage point gap, up from 8.8% last year. The North East and West Midlands were the only regions to see a fall in the proportion of top grades this year, with the North East the only area performing worse than last year and before the pandemic.

“Our Child of the North report on education inequalities shows the persistent North–South divide in educational attainment, meaning too many young people in the North are leaving school with worse results than their peers in the South. This has lifelong consequences – including lower work prospects, reduced earnings, and a greater risk of economic deprivation. Our research also shows that child poverty is also a major driver of educational inequalities, and a barrier to social mobility, and we have urged the Government’s Child Poverty Taskforce to remove the two child cap to alleviate the knock-on effects on young people.

“Without urgent action, the current generation of educationally disadvantaged young people will also face worse physical and mental health outcomes, placing additional pressure on the NHS, social care, and the criminal justice system for years to come.

“We recommend that policymakers address these historical structural inequalities by immediately developing options to adjust the National Funding Formula to include the “health burden” borne by schools – ensuring trends are reversed and that future results do not perpetuate these worrying inequalities.”

• Professor Kate Pickett, Academic Co-Director of Health Equity North and Professor of Epidemiology, University of York
• Professor David Taylor-Robinson, Academic Co-Director of Health Equity North, and Professor of Public Health and Policy at the University of Liverpool