A-level results day produced plenty of celebrations across England in 2026, but the national figures also revealed a striking divide between different types of schools.
Almost half of all A-level entries from independent schools received an A or A*. According to official Ofqual results data, 48.6% of private-school entries achieved grade A or above, compared with 25.4% across all state-funded schools.
That is a gap of more than 23 percentage points.
Grammar schools remained the strongest-performing part of the state sector, with 43.4% of entries receiving an A or A*, but even they finished behind independent schools.
The figures naturally raise a provocative question: are private schools simply getting much better results, or is the comparison more complicated than the headline percentages suggest?
Private Schools Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Produce Top Grades
The headline numbers are difficult to ignore.
Independent schools recorded a 48.6% A/A* rate.
Grammar schools recorded 43.4%.
Sixth-form colleges achieved 25.6%, academies 23.5%, local-authority comprehensive schools 23%, and secondary modern schools 22.4%. Further-education establishments were considerably lower at 12.8%.
In other words, nearly one in every two A-level entries at an independent school received one of the two highest grades.
Among state-funded centres overall, it was closer to one in four.
Ofqual cautions that these categories are based on how examination centres identify themselves and that the categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. That makes them useful for understanding broad patterns rather than treating every category as a perfectly controlled comparison.
Still, the difference is substantial enough that it cannot simply be dismissed as statistical noise.
The Gap Has Widened Again
Private-school results were already significantly ahead.
In 2026, the proportion receiving A or A* increased by about half a percentage point compared with the previous year. State-sector improvements were generally smaller or similar: sixth-form colleges rose about 0.5 points, academies 0.4 points and local-authority comprehensives about 0.3 points. Grammar-school top grades declined slightly.
That produced a modest widening in the private-school advantage.
However, the longer-term picture is more nuanced.
During the pandemic years, when teacher-assessed grades replaced normal examinations, independent schools experienced particularly large increases in top grades. As normal examinations returned, some of that extraordinary gap narrowed. More recent results have been comparatively stable.
So 2026 does not represent an entirely new divide.
It reinforces one that already existed.
Money Is Part of the Story, but It Is Not the Whole Story
It is tempting to look at these results and conclude that paying school fees directly produces higher grades.
That interpretation goes too far.
Private schools often have significant advantages. They may have smaller classes, extensive subject provision, dedicated university-admissions support, extracurricular opportunities and greater financial resources.
But private-school students also differ from the average state-school population before they arrive in the classroom.
Families paying substantial school fees are more likely to have higher incomes and greater educational resources available at home. Some schools are academically selective. Parents may also be able to pay for tutoring, examination preparation and enrichment outside school.
That means the raw results compare different populations as well as different institutions.
The Department for Education’s school performance service provides a broader range of school-level measures because simple headline exam results cannot capture every factor affecting educational performance.
A 48.6% top-grade rate is real.
It does not prove that moving an otherwise identical student from a state school into a private school would automatically produce the same performance advantage.
Grammar Schools Complicate the Argument
Grammar-school results provide perhaps the clearest evidence that selection matters.
Their 43.4% A/A* rate was far closer to the private-school figure of 48.6% than it was to the overall state-funded result of 25.4%.
Grammar schools are state-funded.
Students do not pay private-school fees to attend them.
What distinguishes them is academic selection.
That does not mean resources are irrelevant. It means the type of pupils entering an institution can have an enormous influence on its final examination results.
If high-performing students are concentrated within a selective school, that institution should naturally be expected to produce a greater proportion of top grades.
The private-versus-state debate therefore becomes much more informative when grammar schools are separated from the broader state sector.
Geography Is Producing Another Huge Divide
School type was not the only inequality visible on results day.
Where a student lived also mattered considerably.
In London, 32.7% of A-level entries received A or A*. In both the North East and East Midlands, the equivalent figure was only 23.1%.
That 9.6-percentage-point difference is the largest regional gap recorded since the current grading system began in 2010.
London improved from 32.1% in 2025, while the East Midlands actually declined from 23.8% to 23.1%.
Those figures complicate any attempt to reduce educational inequality to private versus state schools.
A student in a state school in London may be operating within a very different educational environment from a student at a state school in another part of England.
Social mobility campaigners increasingly argue that regional economic conditions, access to teachers, public services and local opportunities all influence educational outcomes.
England Still Recorded Stronger Results Overall
The inequality story should not obscure the fact that 2026 was a strong year nationally.
Across England, 28.3% of A-level entries received A or A*, compared with 28.2% in 2025 and 25.2% in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. Across the UK, the overall share reached 28.5%.
Northern Ireland performed particularly strongly, with 30.7% of entries receiving A or A*, while Wales recorded 29.6%.
The results also helped a record number of young people secure higher-education places. A total of 262,820 UK 18-year-olds had been accepted into university or college by results day, up 3% from 2025.
So the national picture is not one of declining achievement.
It is one of rising achievement combined with persistent—and in some cases widening—differences in who achieves the highest grades.
Maths Is Changing the A-Level Landscape
The subjects students choose are changing too.
Maths remained the country’s most popular A-level, while economics continued growing and entered the top five subjects. At the same time, arts and humanities accounted for only slightly more than one-quarter of A-level entries, compared with around 40% a decade earlier.
Subject choice can influence comparisons between groups.
Some subjects historically produce different grade distributions from others. Schools with unusually strong mathematics, science or language departments can therefore have results shaped partly by the courses their students choose.
There was also a gender difference in top grades in 2026. Boys achieved A or A* in 28.9% of entries compared with 28% for girls.
Exam-result statistics rarely tell only one story.
Better Results Do Not Automatically Mean Better Schools
This is the most important caution behind the private-school figures.
Exam performance measures attainment.
It does not perfectly measure what the school itself added.
Imagine two schools.
One admits students who already achieved exceptionally high GCSE results, come from affluent households and have extensive academic support outside school.
Another serves students with much more varied prior attainment and considerably higher levels of socioeconomic disadvantage.
If the first school produces more A*s, that does not by itself prove its teaching is twice as effective.
Researchers generally need measures such as prior attainment, socioeconomic background and value added before making stronger claims about school effectiveness.
This does not diminish the achievement of independent-school students.
It simply separates two questions that are often incorrectly treated as identical: Who achieved the best results? and Which schools caused the greatest improvement?
The 2026 figures answer the first much more clearly than the second.
The Results Reveal a Broader Opportunity Gap
The most significant part of this year’s A-level results may therefore not be that private schools finished ahead again.
It is how large the differences remain across several parts of the education system.
Private schools reached 48.6% A/A*.
Grammar schools reached 43.4%.
State-funded schools overall were at 25.4%.
London reached 32.7%, while the North East and East Midlands recorded 23.1%.
Those gaps do not have a single explanation.
Selection matters.
Family income matters.
School resources matter.
Geography matters.
Prior attainment matters.
And the opportunities surrounding a student long before he or she walks into an A-level examination hall matter too.
Private schools have widened their lead in 2026, and the numbers make that impossible to ignore.
The more difficult question for policymakers is not whether the gap exists.
It is determining how much of that advantage comes from what happens inside the school gates and how much has already been created before students ever enter them.
