Kent’s Education Divide: GCSE Results, Deprivation and Grammar Schools
shepwayvox
Start in Tonbridge & Malling.
Among GCSE results awarded to 16-year-olds at examination centres in the district this summer, 35.2% were grade 7 or above. Tunbridge Wells was close behind on 34.3%, while Dartford reached 33.3%. England stood at 23.1% and the South East at 25.9%. So Tonbridge & Malling wasn’t merely ahead of the national figure. It was 12.1 percentage points above England and 9.3 points above the South East region.
Now head east.
Dover recorded 16.3% at grade 7 or above. Folkestone & Hythe was 16.4% and Swale 16.5%. Dover therefore sat 6.8 percentage points below England and 9.6 points below the South East. Between Tonbridge & Malling and Dover lies an extraordinary 18.9 percentage-point gap. Put another way, the proportion of top GCSE grades recorded in Tonbridge & Malling was about 2.16 times the proportion in Dover.
That’s where this story begins. But, just as with our A-level investigation, the interesting bit comes when another map is placed underneath the results. This time we’ve taken Ofqual’s newly released 2026 local-authority-district GCSE data and compared it with the Government’s 2025 Children and Young People education-deprivation measure across all 12 Kent districts and Medway. The pattern is considerably harder to dismiss than it was at A-level.
The map uses one consistent Ofqual measure: all GCSE subjects, pupils aged 16, grade 7 and above. That matters. Ofqual’s national release gives England at 23.1% and the South East at 25.8% using its separate results-release regional methodology, while the geographical download used for our district analysis records the South East comparator as 25.9%. Ofqual warns that small differences can arise because its main results release assigns regions through National Centre Number information while its geographical visualisation uses examination-centre postcodes.
And there’s an even more important warning.
These figures do not tell us that 35.2% of GCSEs taken by children who live in Tonbridge & Malling achieved grade 7+. Ofqual assigns each result geographically according to the postcode of the examination centre. In Kent, where pupils routinely cross council boundaries to attend grammar schools and other secondary schools, that distinction isn’t academic. It’s potentially part of the story.
The full Kent and Medway table
Behind the three leaders came Canterbury on 24.6% and Maidstone on 24.2%, both above England but below the South East geographical comparator. Sevenoaks recorded 22.7%, Ashford 21.6% and Gravesham 20.2%. Medway and Thanet were level on 19.3%, followed by Swale at 16.5%, Folkestone & Hythe at 16.4% and Dover at 16.3%.
Only five of the 13 areas examined — Tonbridge & Malling, Tunbridge Wells, Dartford, Canterbury and Maidstone — exceeded England’s 23.1%. Eight were below it. Only the first three cleared the South East figure contained in the geographical dataset. That immediately gives us a rather different picture from simply saying the South East is a high-performing region. Kent and Medway don’t move as one educational block.
The distance from England makes that divide clearer still. Tonbridge & Malling was +12.1 percentage points, Tunbridge Wells +11.2 and Dartford +10.2. Canterbury was +1.5 and Maidstone +1.1. Sevenoaks slipped just below England at -0.4, Ashford was -1.5, Gravesham -2.9, Medway and Thanet both -3.8, Swale -6.6, Folkestone & Hythe -6.7 and Dover -6.8.
That’s a remarkably wide spread inside one county and its neighbouring unitary authority.
Now put deprivation underneath it
The Government’s English Indices of Deprivation divide the country into small neighbourhoods and assess several forms of deprivation. Within Education, Skills and Training sits a Children and Young People sub-domain, designed to capture educational deprivation affecting younger residents rather than mixing their circumstances with adult skills. It’s the same measure we used in our A-level investigation.
Swale has the highest concentration in our Kent and Medway comparison: 27.8% of its neighbourhoods fall within England’s most deprived 10% on that Children and Young People education measure. Folkestone & Hythe follows on 26.9%, Thanet 24.4%, Dover 21.7% and Canterbury 18.5%. Medway stands at 11.2%, Sevenoaks 10.7%, Ashford 9.9%, Maidstone 7.1%, Gravesham 6.2%, Tonbridge & Malling 5.1%, Tunbridge Wells 4.3% and Dartford just 3.0%. Those figures were calculated from the Government’s 2025 neighbourhood and local-authority data.
Now compare the ends of the two tables.
Tonbridge & Malling: 35.2% GCSE grade 7+; 5.1% of neighbourhoods in the most deprived national tenth for child educational deprivation. Tunbridge Wells: 34.3% and 4.3%. Dartford: 33.3% and 3.0%. At the opposite end, Swale records 16.5% and 27.8%; Folkestone & Hythe 16.4% and 26.9%; Dover 16.3% and 21.7%.
At first glance, the two maps almost look like mirror images.
This time, the maths is pretty striking
Across the 13 areas, the Pearson correlation is approximately -0.756 between the proportion of neighbourhoods in England’s most deprived tenth for child educational deprivation and the proportion of GCSE results at grade 7+. The Spearman rank correlation is about -0.812. In plain English, places with more concentrated child educational deprivation generally have fewer top GCSE grades recorded at their examination centres. Both tests are statistically significant on this 13-area comparison, although that doesn’t magically turn association into cause.
The Spearman figure matters because it asks a relatively simple question: as one table gets worse, does the other broadly get worse too? Here the answer is yes, quite strongly. The negative sign is simply because our deprivation figure gets larger as deprivation worsens, while GCSE performance moves in the opposite direction.
But this is exactly where a decent investigation has to resist getting carried away.
Thirteen areas is a small sample. The deprivation data describe where people live. The Ofqual data describe where examination centres sit. School intakes differ, independent schools alter the mix, subject entries aren’t identical, pupils travel, and Kent deliberately selects a sizeable share of children into grammar schools. Correlation tells us that two geographical patterns resemble one another. It doesn’t tell us that one variable, on its own, caused the other.
And some districts misbehave.
Canterbury and Gravesham don’t fit neatly
Canterbury has relatively high child educational deprivation by Kent standards: 18.5% of neighbourhoods are in England’s most deprived tenth on this measure. Yet its 24.6% GCSE top-grade result is above England and comfortably ahead of Ashford, Gravesham, Medway, Thanet, Swale, Folkestone & Hythe and Dover. If deprivation alone dictated GCSE outcomes, Canterbury shouldn’t sit where it does.
Gravesham presents the opposite puzzle. Only 6.2% of its neighbourhoods fall into the most deprived national tenth for Children and Young People education deprivation — lower than Ashford, Sevenoaks, Medway, Canterbury, Dover, Thanet, Folkestone & Hythe and Swale. Yet only 20.2% of its GCSE results reached grade 7+, almost three points below England.
Sevenoaks is another useful brake on an over-simple story. Its deprivation figure is 10.7%, well below the coastal districts, but its GCSE grade-7+ rate is 22.7%, fractionally below England. Meanwhile Canterbury, with considerably greater measured educational deprivation, performs better.
So something else is going on.
As with the A-level figures, that sends us back to the school system itself.
Kent isn’t an ordinary secondary-school system
Kent and Medway remain two of England’s most heavily selective education areas. The whole point of grammar selection is that pupils are sorted before GCSE. Children assessed as academically selective are concentrated in particular schools, while non-selective schools educate a different intake. Those schools aren’t spread evenly between districts.
The national 2026 figures show just how dramatic the difference between centre types can be. Across England, 63.2% of GCSE results at grammar-school centres were grade 7 or above. At independent schools it was 47.1%. Among academies it was 19.7%, free schools 21.7%, local-authority-maintained comprehensives 20.1% and secondary modern schools 16.8%. Across all state-funded centres combined, 20.6% of results reached grade 7+.
Grammar-school centres therefore recorded top grades at just over three times the rate of state-funded centres overall, and nearly four times the rate recorded in secondary modern schools. That doesn’t demonstrate that the grammar school itself created that whole difference: those pupils were academically selected before they arrived. But it does show why the geographical distribution of grammar schools can heavily influence a district-level results map.
Think about Tonbridge & Malling, Tunbridge Wells and Dartford — the three districts in our table exceeding 33% at grade 7+. Their results don’t merely tell us something about the neighbourhoods surrounding them. They tell us something about the mix of examination centres located there and the pupils those centres attract. Ofqual itself warns that its geographical data are assigned through examination-centre postcodes.
That point becomes particularly important when we compare GCSEs with deprivation.
A child can live in a deprived neighbourhood in one district and travel to a grammar school in another. The deprivation remains attached to the neighbourhood where the child lives. The GCSE grade, in Ofqual’s map, moves to the postcode of the examination centre. The two datasets can therefore pull the same pupil in different geographical directions.
That doesn’t destroy the correlation we found.
It makes it more intriguing.
Folkestone & Hythe, Swale and Dover
The coastal end of the table is particularly difficult to ignore. Folkestone & Hythe has 26.9% of neighbourhoods in England’s most deprived tenth for child educational deprivation and a 2026 GCSE grade-7+ result of 16.4% — 6.7 percentage points below England. Swale combines the highest deprivation concentration, 27.8%, with a top-grade figure of 16.5%. Dover records 21.7% and 16.3% respectively.
Thanet is slightly different. Its deprivation concentration is also extremely high at 24.4%, but its GCSE result of 19.3% is several points better than the three districts beneath it. It still sits 3.8 points below England, but it’s another reminder that deprivation doesn’t operate like a switch automatically determining exam results.
Medway is worth separating from Kent rather than burying it in the middle. Its 19.3% top-grade result is also 3.8 points below England and 6.6 points below the South East geographical comparator, while 11.2% of its neighbourhoods fall within the most deprived national tenth on the child-education measure. Medway also operates an academically selective system, so many of the same cautions about pupil movement and school mix apply there too.
What about boys and girls?
The 2026 national data show another divide operating underneath the geography. Among 16-year-olds taking seven or more GCSEs, 6.7% of girls achieved grade 7 or above in every GCSE they took, compared with 4.4% of boys. At the grade-4 threshold the difference was wider: 51.1% of girls achieved grade 4+ across all their GCSEs against 41.9% of boys.
Be careful with that measure. It’s not the same thing as saying 6.7% of girls’ individual GCSE entries were grade 7+. Ofqual’s table is student-based and asks whether a pupil taking at least seven GCSEs achieved the threshold in all of them. That makes it useful for comparing boys and girls, but it shouldn’t be mixed directly with our district entry percentages as though the denominators were identical.
Subject patterns complicate the familiar “girls do better” headline further. Ofqual says the national maths top-grade rate for 16-year-olds increased by 0.8 percentage points this year, reflecting stronger attainment demonstrated by the National Reference Test. Overall, though, the national picture remained stable: 21.8% of GCSE results at all ages were grade 7+ compared with 21.7% in 2025. Among 16-year-old results specifically, the figure was the 23.1% comparator used throughout our district analysis.
Results day isn’t the whole education system
Ofqual issued 5.72 million GCSE results this summer. Just over 1.047 million students received at least one GCSE result, while 16-year-olds took eight GCSEs on average. Those numbers matter because a district percentage is built from thousands of individual subject results, not from a simple headcount of children who either “passed” or “failed”.
Our Ofqual extraction contains, for example, 15,650 results underlying the Tonbridge & Malling aged-16 all-subject figure, 15,645 in Tunbridge Wells, 17,055 in Dartford, 8,105 in Folkestone & Hythe and 10,335 in Dover. Medway’s much larger unitary area contributed 30,455. That’s why describing a district’s 35.2% as “35.2% of pupils” would be wrong: it is 35.2% of GCSE results meeting the threshold.
That distinction also makes the comparison with the Government’s pupil-level Key Stage 4 data important. The latest DfE release still concerns the 2024/25 academic year and covers pupils attending state-funded schools, with breakdowns for disadvantage, free school meals, SEN, ethnicity and other characteristics. Those data answer different questions from Ofqual’s results-day examination-centre dataset.
When the DfE publishes the equivalent 2025/26 pupil-level KS4 results, we’ll be able to test this story much harder: not simply which examination centres recorded the grades, but how outcomes differed for disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils, FSM pupils, boys and girls and other groups. Until then, pretending today’s Ofqual figures tell us all of that would be overclaiming.
What the numbers actually allow us to say
They allow us to say that Kent’s 2026 GCSE results are deeply uneven geographically. Three districts — Tonbridge & Malling, Tunbridge Wells and Dartford — sit more than ten percentage points above England at grade 7+. Three others — Dover, Folkestone & Hythe and Swale — sit roughly seven percentage points below. That isn’t a marginal difference hidden by rounding. It’s a substantial divide.
They also allow us to say that this divide has a strong statistical relationship with the geography of educational deprivation affecting children and young people. On our 13-area comparison, Pearson is about -0.76 and Spearman about -0.81. The poorer educational geography is concentrated particularly in Swale, Folkestone & Hythe, Thanet and Dover; the strongest GCSE top-grade outcomes are concentrated in Tonbridge & Malling, Tunbridge Wells and Dartford.
What they don’t allow us to say is that deprivation alone causes those grades.
Canterbury, Gravesham and Sevenoaks stop us doing that. Grammar-school selection stops us doing that. Cross-border pupil movement stops us doing that. Independent schools, differing school intakes and the use of examination-centre rather than residential geography stop us doing that.
But perhaps the most important finding is precisely that these qualifications can’t be separated neatly from the system producing them.
England’s 2026 grade-7+ figure for 16-year-olds is 23.1%. In one Kent district the figure is 35.2%. In another it is 16.3%. Meanwhile, one area has just 3% of neighbourhoods in England’s most deprived tenth for child educational deprivation; another has 27.8%. Layer on an education system that selects roughly a quarter of pupils into grammar education and moves children across district boundaries, and the idea of a single “Kent GCSE result” starts to look pretty meaningless.
The better question is the same one our A-level investigation left us with, only now the evidence is stronger.
Which children are getting the top grades, where are their schools, where do those children actually live — and how much of Kent’s education divide is being shaped long before results day?
The 2026 Ofqual local-authority data don’t provide the final answer.
They give us a very good reason to keep digging.
Have a story that needs telling, or information you think may interest us? Please get in touch. All correspondence will be treated in the strictest confidence TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me
