A-Level Results Day 2026: The National Picture, Before West Kent's Own

Thousands of West Kent students picked up their A-level results this morning, part of a national cohort Ofqual has already begun crunching the numbers on: 835,950 A-levels awarded to 320,505 students across 2,835 schools and colleges, an increase of 2.7% on last year. We're holding off on school-by-school figures for Maidstone, Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge & Malling until we can confirm them properly against each school's own results — a few hours after grades land is too soon to trust what's circulating, and we'd rather run it right than run it first. What follows is the national and regional picture results day sits inside this year, which is worth knowing regardless of which school your results came from.

The headline from the exams regulator is stability rather than a swing in either direction. The proportion of grades at A* or A rose only marginally nationally, from 28.2% last year to 28.3% this year, and Ofqual's own explanation for even that small movement is telling: it's almost entirely down to maths, the single most-taken A-level subject, where A*/A grades rose from 41.6% to 42.1%. Ofqual is explicit that this isn't grade inflation — the standard required for any given grade in maths hasn't shifted — but reflects a slightly stronger cohort of students taking the subject this year. With maths accounting for roughly one in eight of all A-level results issued today, what happens in that one subject has an outsized pull on the national figure.

One detail with genuine local relevance: Ofqual singles out London and the South East as the regions with the highest percentage of results at A or A*, which puts Kent inside the strongest-performing part of the country this year rather than merely average. That's a regional figure rather than a Kent-specific one, and it says nothing yet about how individual West Kent schools performed relative to each other or to their own past results — but it's a reasonable steer on the environment this year's results landed in.

A few other national figures worth having as context: about two-thirds of A-level students took three subjects, 7,245 eighteen-year-olds nationally achieved an A* in every subject they sat, and 25 of those took five or more A-levels. Vocational and technical routes grew too — T Level awards rose to 19,665, up from 11,980 last year, as that qualification continues to establish itself as a genuine alternative pathway rather than a niche one.

There's also a structural change worth flagging for anyone who wants to dig into this themselves: this is the first year Ofqual has published results broken down geographically at local authority level, via its Analytics tool, rather than just nationally and by region. That means a genuine Kent-specific — not just South East — picture should become available in the coming days, and we'll be watching for it alongside the individual school results we're already chasing down. Source: Ofqual