London's A-level students achieved top grades at a record rate this year, with 32.7% gaining A* or A grades, while the East Midlands and north-east both saw less than a quarter of candidates reach that level, according to official results published on Thursday. The gap between London and the lowest-performing regions has grown to 9.6 percentage points, the largest since the pandemic and significantly higher than the 3.9-point disparity in 2019.
Regional Disparities in A-level Results
In the East Midlands, 23.1% of candidates secured A* or A grades, down from 23.8% in 2025, while the north-east saw a marginal increase to 23.1% from 22.9% last year. The gap in A* grades specifically has widened from two percentage points in 2019 to 5.1 points in 2026, according to the data.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has put regional inequality at the top of his agenda, and the education sector is now highlighting the need for action. Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, said: "Our capital has become an educational outlier while too many young people in the north-east, East Midlands and other parts of the country are growing up in very different worlds of opportunity. England is no longer defined by a simple north-south divide. It is increasingly a story of London pulling away from much of the country. Talent is spread evenly across the country; opportunity is not."
Factors Behind London's Success
London's transformation began with Tony Blair's London Challenge in 2003, which initiated school improvements. Since then, higher pay and cultural attractiveness have incentivised more teachers to join the capital's schools, while ambitious migrant families have helped raise standards. The Department for Education says its Rise teams (regional improvement for standards and excellence) are putting "a laser focus" on areas and schools where performance is weakest.
A proposal in the schools white paper to use household income to vary funding rates according to the level of disadvantage, so that children with more entrenched disadvantage attract more funding, has also been welcomed. However, the scale and persistence of the disparities laid bare in Thursday's results clearly require significant intervention.
Calls for Systemic Change
Chris Zarraga, the director of Schools North East, which represents 1,150 schools in the region, said schools in different parts of England were not operating on a level playing field. "In the north-east, schools are working within communities facing entrenched disadvantage, intense pressure on public services, growing Send [special educational needs and disabilities] needs and very different access to opportunities and infrastructure. Increasingly, schools are being asked to compensate for all of those things. That does not mean accepting lower outcomes. These divides are not inevitable. But we will not close them simply by demanding more from schools while leaving the conditions around them unchanged. Government needs to treat this as a system challenge."
He called for a long-term approach encompassing education, early years, health, Send, transport, skills and economic development, alongside high-quality academic and vocational pathways. Elliot Major echoed this, saying an "ambitious, region-first approach" was needed. "Too many rural, coastal and post-industrial communities have been left with fewer educational and economic opportunities. The warning lights are flashing: persistent attainment gaps by background and place, historically high levels of school absence, and growing divides outside the school gates."
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union, said more funding was needed. "Schools do everything they can to respond to poverty but the pressures and strains on schools in areas of disadvantage must be addressed by Andy Burnham's government, including all our schools and colleges to be properly funded."
Zarraga concluded: "Results day should reflect young people's potential and hard work, not the structural advantages or disadvantages of where they happen to grow up."
