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, twenty seven marks more for the same grade.
The usual answer is that students keep getting cleverer, so the bar keeps rising. It is mostly not that. There are two much bigger reasons, and once you see them it changes how you should revise.
Everything below is Edexcel GCSE maths, specification 1MA1. Boundaries work the same way on every board, but the numbers differ, so do not carry these ones across to another qualification.
The paper changed, not the students
Every June is a brand new paper, and no two are equally hard. When the paper is kinder, everyone scores more marks, so the mark you need for a grade has to rise. Otherwise far more students would get the grade than it is meant for.
2025 shows it perfectly. A grade 9 cost 20 more marks than in 2024, rising from 197 to 217.
If students had got cleverer, more of them would have reached a 9. They did not. 3.5% got a grade 9 in 2024. 3.5% got a grade 9 in 2025. Not close. 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 who got a grade 9
3.0% to 4.6% across the same 8 series
Grade 7 did the same. It rose nineteen marks, from 137 to 156, and the share at a 7 or better barely moved, from 17.9% to 18.0%.
So the 2025 paper was simply easier. Ofqual puts it in one line:
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 how a grade 7 this year is kept worth the same as a grade 7 in 2019, whatever this year’s paper turned out to be like. A higher boundary tells you about the paper. It does not tell 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.
A-Level maths does the same thing on a bigger scale. A grade A moved by 45 marks between 2019 and this summer. We have set that out in why A-Level maths grade boundaries are going up.
Students got better at the exam, not at maths
The GCSE you sit today was first sat in 2017. That summer nobody had seen a paper quite like it. There were no past papers to practise from, and teachers were guessing at what the examiners wanted. Marks were low, so the boundaries were low. A grade 9 took 190 marks.
The next summer a grade 9 took 202. Twelve more marks, one year later, and the share of students getting a 9 did not rise with it.
What changed was not the students. Teachers now had a year of papers to learn from. They knew how questions tend to be worded, where the method marks sit, and how an examiner wants working set out. Students practised the exact format they would sit.
Ofqual has a name for this: the sawtooth effect. Results dip when a new exam arrives, then climb back as everyone gets used to it. It mostly happens in the first couple of years, and by 2018 it had largely done its work. The big swings since then come from the paper, which is the first reason.
That is real progress, but it is progress at the exam. Knowing how to write an answer an examiner will credit is worth learning. It is just not the same thing as understanding more maths.
So are students getting smarter at all?
At the very top, a little. But you cannot see it in the boundaries, and that is the part that confuses people.
Before a single paper is marked, Ofqual works out roughly what share of this year’s students should get each grade, from how the same students did in their SATs at age 11. The boundaries are then set so the results come out close to that. So the share getting a grade 9 is close to a decision made in advance. It sits still because it is held still, which means it cannot tell you whether students improved.
Ofqual runs a separate test for exactly that question, called the National Reference Test. About 350 schools sit it every spring, and unlike the GCSE it is allowed to move. In maths it has: the share reaching grade 7 standard rose from 19.9% in 2017 to 23.9% in 2026. So in 2026 Ofqual told the exam boards to let a little of that show, and to set the upper boundaries lower than they otherwise would have been. That is part of why a grade 9 fell to 208 and 3.8% of students got one.
Two things keep this in proportion. It is only at the top: the share reaching grade 4 standard barely moved, from 70.7% to 71.6%. And it is small: nearly all of that improvement has gone into the boundary rather than onto certificates.
Every June series since the new GCSE began
| June | Grade 9 | Grade 7 | Grade 4 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marks | Got this | Marks | Got this | Marks | Got this | |
| 2017 | 190 | 3.6% | 124 | 9.4% | 41 | 21.4% |
| 2018 | 202 | 3.0% | 139 | 7.6% | 50 | 19.3% |
| 2019 | 198 | 3.0% | 137 | 7.6% | 52 | 20.0% |
| 2020 | none | 4.2% | none | 8.8% | none | 20.9% |
| 2021 | none | 4.9% | none | 9.2% | none | 20.4% |
| 2022 | 194 | 4.6% | 137 | 8.8% | 38 | 17.1% |
| 2023 | 203 | 3.6% | 145 | 8.1% | 47 | 18.2% |
| 2024 | 197 | 3.5% | 137 | 8.3% | 42 | 17.0% |
| 2025 | 217 | 3.5% | 156 | 7.5% | 53 | 17.7% |
| 2026* | 208 | 3.8% | 146 | 8.2% | 50 | 16.2% |
Each share is the students who got that grade itself, so the rows do not add up to the figure Pearson publishes, which counts everyone at that grade or above. An asterisk marks a year whose shares are Pearson's first published figures, which it revises later; the boundaries on that row are final. No summer 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. Both are linked on the GCSE maths past papers page, series by series.
Read each pair of columns together. At grade 9 the marks needed have ranged over 27 across the run, while the share has ranged over just 1.6 points. Each share is the students who got that grade itself. At grade 9 that matches the figure usually reported, because nothing sits above a 9. Lower down the two come apart: the 2026 grade 7 row reads 8.2%, the students who got exactly a 7, while the 18.5% quoted above counts everyone at a 7 or better.
The years that really did move
The two highest lines in the table are 2020 and 2021, at 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%, with some of the lowest boundaries 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 normal grading, and returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2023.
So the 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
A higher boundary does not mean students got smarter. It happens for two bigger reasons.
The paper changes every year. When it is easier, everyone scores more, so the boundary rises to keep the grade worth the same. Twenty more marks in 2025 bought exactly the same 3.5% at grade 9.
Students learn the exam. In the first years of a new GCSE, teachers and students learn what the examiners want, and marks rise without anyone understanding more maths. Ofqual calls it the sawtooth effect.
At the very top, students have also got a little better, and in 2026 Ofqual let some of it show. But it is small, and nowhere near enough to explain a twenty mark jump in one summer.
So the number to beat is not last year’s boundary. It is the best mark you are capable of putting on the paper.
Boundary figures in this article are Pearson’s published grade boundaries for the qualification, out of 240. The per paper figures on our past papers pages come from Pearson’s notional component documents instead, which are a notional split of the same boundary and do not add back up to it exactly. Outcome figures are Pearson’s grade statistics for 1MA1. All are 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. The sawtooth effect is explained in GCSEs 2021: what is the sawtooth effect? and studied in An investigation into the Sawtooth Effect in secondary school assessments in England. The National Reference Test figures and the instruction to exam boards come from Ofqual’s National Reference Test annual statement 2026 and its blog post The 2026 National Reference Test: rising attainment in maths and what this means for grades.