Essentially, the plan is to award some grades in French and German more generously this year, to bring grading in these subjects more closely in line with grading in Spanish. But we would argue that grading in Spanish is also overly harsh, and that these adjustments may still not go far enough.
The other exception is computer science, another harshly graded subject, in which Ofqual is also requiring grades at 9, 7 and 4 to be awarded more generously this year.
The proportion of pupils entered for the EBacc belarus rcs data increased slightly last year. But only very slightly. And it’s remained at around 39-40% for nearly ten years now.
So why aren’t EBacc entries increasing? It’s the old story: relatively few pupils are studying languages at GCSE.
As a reminder, the EBacc, or English Baccalaureate, consists of entering for GCSEs in five subject areas, sometimes known as ‘pillars’: English, maths, science, languages, and humanities (either history or geography).
Virtually all pupils in mainstream schools enter GCSEs in English and maths, and the vast majority in science. Humanities entries are slightly less common, but were still entered by 82% of pupils last year, according to DfE figures. The sticking point is languages.