Why Are GCSE Maths Grade Boundaries Going Up?
Edexcel GCSE maths, every June series from 2017 to 2026. A grade 9 cost twenty more marks in 2025 than in 2024, and exactly the same share of students got one.
Students ask this every August, and it is a fair question. In 2017 a grade 9 on Edexcel GCSE Maths Higher took 190 marks out of 240. By 2025 it took 217, which is twenty seven marks more for the same grade.
The usual answer is that students keep getting better, so the bar keeps rising.
That answer is wrong. The exam board’s own figures show it, and they are worth two minutes of your time, because what the boundary really means changes how you should revise.
Everything below is Edexcel GCSE maths, specification 1MA1. Boundaries work the same way on every board and in every subject, but the numbers are different, so do not carry these ones across to another qualification.
The 2025 series settles it
In June 2024, a grade 9 needed 197 marks. In June 2025, it needed 217.
Twenty marks. That is most of a long question.
If that jump meant the year group was stronger, more of them would have come away with the grade.
They did not. 3.5% got a grade 9 in 2024. 3.5% got a grade 9 in 2025. Not close to the same. The same.
Pearson Edexcel GCSE maths 1MA1, Higher tier
Marks needed for a grade 9, out of 240
190 to 217 marks across the 8 series
Share of everyone who sat it who got a grade 9
3.0% to 4.6% across the same 8
Grade 7 did the same thing. It rose nineteen marks, from 137 to 156, and the share of students reaching it went from 17.9% to 18.0%.
And 2026 rules it out completely
The following summer, the boundaries came back down. A grade 9 fell to 208 and a grade 7 to 146.
More students got those grades, not fewer: 3.8% at grade 9 and 18.5% at grade 7.
So in 2026 the papers asked for fewer marks and handed out slightly more top grades. If a rising boundary meant better students, that could not happen.
What the boundary is actually for
Grade boundaries are not set when the paper is written. They are set after almost every script in the country has been marked.
Ofqual’s own guidance says it plainly:
If an exam is easier than in previous years, the grade boundaries for that paper will be higher. If it is harder, the grade boundaries will be lower.
That is the whole mechanism. The boundary is how the exam board keeps a grade 7 in 2026 worth the same as a grade 7 in 2019, whatever this year’s paper turned out to be like.
So a boundary that goes up is telling you something about the paper. It is not telling you that you have to beat last year’s students.
We have written separately about what boundary movement means for your revision target, which is the part that actually affects your marks.
Every June series since the new GCSE began
| June | Grade 9 | Grade 7 | Grade 4 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marks | Got it | Marks | Got it | Marks | Got it | |
| 2017 | 190 | 3.6% | 124 | 19.8% | 41 | 69.7% |
| 2018 | 202 | 3.0% | 139 | 16.4% | 50 | 60.6% |
| 2019 | 198 | 3.0% | 137 | 16.3% | 52 | 60.3% |
| 2020 | none | 4.2% | none | 19.4% | none | 67.2% |
| 2021 | none | 4.9% | none | 21.0% | none | 69.3% |
| 2022 | 194 | 4.6% | 137 | 20.6% | 38 | 65.9% |
| 2023 | 203 | 3.6% | 145 | 18.1% | 47 | 63.0% |
| 2024 | 197 | 3.5% | 137 | 17.9% | 42 | 62.2% |
| 2025 | 217 | 3.5% | 156 | 18.0% | 53 | 62.0% |
| 2026 | 208 | 3.8% | 146 | 18.5% | 50 | 61.2% |
No exams were sat in 2020 or 2021, so there are no boundaries for those two years. The grades came from teacher assessment instead, which is why they are the two highest lines in the table. Boundaries are from Pearson's notional component documents and shares are from Pearson's grade statistics for 1MA1. Both are linked on the GCSE maths past papers page, series by series.
Read each pair of columns together. The marks swing by up to twenty a year. The shares sit inside a couple of points.
There is a slow drift upwards since 2019, about a point at grade 9 and two at grade 7. That drift is real. It is nowhere near big enough to explain a twenty mark jump in a single summer.
The years that really did move
Look at 2020 and 2021. They are the two highest lines in the table: 4.2% and 4.9% at grade 9, against 3.0% in 2019.
They are also the two years with no exams at all. Grades came from teachers instead.
2022 is next, at 4.6%, and its boundaries were among the lowest in the table. A grade 9 for 194 marks, a grade 4 for 38. That was policy, not a stronger year group. Ofqual set 2022 as a staging post on the way back to pre-pandemic grading, and returned results to pre-pandemic levels in 2023.
So the three biggest moves in the share of top grades over ten years all came from how grades were awarded that year. None of them came from the papers getting harder.
What to do with this
Stop using last year’s boundary as this year’s target. It describes last year’s paper. Yours has not been written into a boundary yet.
Aim above the top of the recent range, not at the middle of it. For a grade 9 on Higher, the range over the last four summers is 197 to 217. Train for 217 and a bad paper cannot take the grade off you.
Do not read a high boundary as bad news. A high boundary usually means an accessible paper, which is the paper you want. It also means marks are cheaper to lose, so the silly ones cost more.
Every series, paper by paper, with its boundaries and its outcomes printed beside it, is on our GCSE maths past papers page. If you want to turn your own mock marks into a realistic grade range, use the grade predictor.
The short version
Boundaries go up when the paper is easier and down when it is harder. They move so that the grade does not.
The proof is that the share of students getting each grade barely changes whatever the boundary does. Twenty more marks in 2025 bought exactly the same 3.5%.
So the number to beat is not last year’s boundary. It is the best mark you are capable of putting on the paper.
Figures in this article come from Pearson’s notional component grade boundaries and Pearson’s grade statistics for 1MA1, both published after each series. The quotation is from Ofqual and the Department for Education’s guidance, GCSE and A level grading: what you need to know, and the 2022 and 2023 grading policy is set out in Ofqual’s approach to grading in summer 2022.