On Wednesday this week I gave a briefing to journalists about some of the trends that we might expect to see in this year's A level and GCSE results given provisional entry data and known changes to qualifications. A number of media organisations quoted me as saying there appeared to be a 50% fall in the take-up of GCSE Citizenship this year compared to last. Unfortunately we have spotted an error in our calculations, comparing only Full Course entries this year with the combined total of Full Course and Short Course entries in 2014. This gave us the figure of around 50%.
We've subsequently taken another look at our provisional data and there appear to be two different stories. Separating Short and Full courses out, there is around a 45% fall in Short Course entries this year and about a 10% rise in Full Course entries.
As I made clear to the journalists present on Wednesday, the data we were discussing were only provisional, and JCQ will report Full Course and Short Course data separately when they publish results in two weeks.
Glenys Stacey
Chief Regulator