The results are in...
The experience of taking your GCSEs can be a rollercoaster ride, so whatever results you or someone close to you has just opened today, well done from all of us at the Royal Society of Chemistry on the culmination of years of study.
When last year’s results came out we explained that the speed of changes around GCSEs raised questions about how to achieve an appropriate qualification that serves the majority of students while enabling those who have talent in the subject to continue to higher level studies.
Overall in 2014, numbers of students taking GCSEs have gone down by 4.18%. The number sitting individual sciences also went down, with 16.77% fewer taking chemistry – comparable to the 14.63% drop in physics and 18.65% in biology.
| GCSE | 2014 | 2013 | % change |
| Total | 138,238 | 166,091 | -16.77 |
| Male | 70,308 | 85,089 | -17.37 |
| Female | 67,930 | 81,002 | -16.14 |
| Female/Male ratio | 49.1%/50.9% | 48.8%/51.2% |
This drop in individual sciences brings to an end a trend of increasing entrants for the separate sciences that stretched back to 2006. As our Schools and Colleges Manager Nicole Morgan explained to the Press Association, we’re concerned about this but we’re also aware that it could be due to a combination of factors, rather than a single cause.
She said: ''Schools are having to cope with the move from modular to linear exams, league tables that discourage entering students for a subject more than once, timetable pressures, and the introduction of the EBacc which only requires two sciences.
''We will be monitoring the numbers closely and collecting more information to determine whether this is a short term impact of policy and structural changes or a real decline in the number of individual students studying chemistry.''
If you or someone you know is still deciding what to do next, have a look at our careers pages – you might find A future in Chemistry is more varied, rewarding and important than you realise.