Provisional Summer 2026 entries for Wales

An annual report which presents provisional data on entries for GCSE, AS, A level, Advanced Skills Baccalaureate Wales and Skills Challenge Certificate for Wales.

Key Points

GCSE

293,865 GCSE entries were made in Wales for summer 2026. This is 6.0% lower than in summer 2025.
Year 11 learners are the most likely to enter for GCSEs in the summer series, making up 94.7% of entries in summer 2026.
The number of Year 11 entries decreased by 0.5% this summer compared to summer 2025.
Year 10 entries made up 0.6% of all GCSE entries this summer. There were 1,845 entries for Year 10 learners in summer 2026, 89.7% lower than in summer 2025.
Year 13 or above entries increased this summer, making up 2.2% of total GCSE entries.

There were 42,860 AS level entries for summer 2026 in Wales, 5.0% more than in summer 2025.
There were 34,115 entries for Year 12 learners in summer 2026, an increase of 0.8% compared to 2025.
The number of Year 13 entries increased by 27.4% this summer compared to 2025.

A level

There were 32,800 A level entries for summer 2026, 2.6% more than in summer 2025. A level entries had been decreasing annually since a peak of 36,420 in summer 2022.
Compared to summer 2025, there was an increase of 2.5% in entries for Year 13 learners. Year 13 learners accounted for 90.1% of all A level entries this summer.
Year 14 and above entries have increased by 6.7% between summer 2025 and summer 2026, but made up a similar proportion of total entries in both years.

This release covers cash-in qualification entries and does not include entries for learners sitting individual units. Many learners in Year 10 are sitting one or more units of the new wave 1 GCSEs in summer 2026, but these are not included in the scope of this release.

There are a number of factors that can influence why entries for year groups change over time, such as changes to:

Population size.
Entry behaviour, eg when learners are entered for their GCSEs.
The number of qualifications of each type being taken on average.
The introduction of new qualifications due to reform, eg new GCSEs.
The types of qualifications being taken in post-16.

Entry figures in this release will have been affected by different approaches to awarding grades between 2020 and 2023, as well as by other disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Further information can be found in the background notes.

As this release is based on counts of entries at qualification level it is not possible for us to quantify the impact of such factors. We have commented on factors influencing changes in entries only where we are confident that these factors are likely to be associated with a change.