Guidance

Ofqual statistical work programme: 2026

Published 5 February 2026

Applies to England

Ofqual routinely publishes statistics on a range of topics related to the qualifications, examinations and assessment system in England.

Our statistics are released as quarterly and annual official statistics, other annual statistical releases that are not yet badged as official statistics, and a range of interactive visualisations of our data. See the Statistics at Ofqual page for more information and links to all of our routine outputs, including our preannouncements calendar for official statistics and interactive visualisations published on our Ofqual Analytics site.

We are committed to improving the way we produce and disseminate our statistics, to provide the education assessment sector (and beyond) with access to well-trusted, high-quality and highly-valued data insights, all in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics.

This work programme outlines the developments we made in 2025 as well as a high-level overview of our current priorities and planned changes to our work in 2026.

Publishing this plan is part of our broader commitment to increased transparency with the users of our statistics regarding our ongoing work, and is part of our commitment to comply with the Code of Practice for Statistics. The plans outlined here also support several objectives within Ofqual’s strategy for 2025 to 2028, as part of our regulatory stewardship of the qualifications system.

We welcome any feedback you may have on this plan as well as feedback on any of our statistics. Please email our statistics team to give general feedback or complete our short survey to give feedback on specific releases.

We aim to publish another update towards the start of 2027, to outline progress made against the current plan and what our priorities will be for the following year.

Our development work in 2025

Throughout 2025, we carried out a significant piece of work on improving the methodology and presentation of our access arrangements statistics, to address data quality issues and to improve the transparency of our reporting. This work will continue over the next few years and as such these statistics have been labelled as official statistics in development. For more detail on why we made these changes, and what else Ofqual is doing in this area, please see our blog piece and regulatory report.

We published a new summer qualification results in England statistical release. The purpose of this was to provide a detailed report on the results issued on August results days, for both general and vocational qualifications included in performance tables. This release is an improvement on the way we have disseminated numbers on previous results days as it contains much more context than was previously available, in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics’ Standards for the Public Use of Statistics, Data and Wider Analysis. We plan to further develop this release and continue to publish it on an annual basis, each August.

For our annual equalities analysis this year, we took the decision to exclude analysis on level 1, level 1/2, and level 2 vocational qualifications included in performance tables as well as GCSEs. This is because crucial information on the prior attainment at key stage 2 of students taking these qualifications is not available following the cancellation of key stage 2 assessments in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following stakeholder feedback, we did however make analyses for previous years available for these qualifications. We plan to take the same approach in the 2026 update. 

In our GCSE outcomes by centre type and A level outcomes by centre type interactive visualisations, we enhanced the presentation of centre type breakdowns. We included more accurate categorisation of selective schools and also added the ability for users to directly compare independent schools with all state-funded schools combined.

In our performance table qualifications (PTQ) outcomes dashboards for level 1, level 1/2 and level 2 PTQs and level 3 PTQs, we added options for breakdowns by sex and age group, to allow users to explore this data in a more granular way.

We overhauled the background information notes for our malpractice statistics, making them clearer, more complete and more transparent. The aim was to ensure that users are equipped with all the information they might possibly need to make fully informed decisions using our statistics. We plan to use these developments as a model to improve our other statistics in similar ways.

We made significant improvements to the presentation of our statistics on reviews of marking and moderation. In particular, we focused on restructuring the report to enable clearer presentation, supporting better user understanding of this complex system. In response to user feedback, we have also focused on making the statistics more relatable, by focusing more on proportions rather than absolute numbers, again to support better understanding. We recognise there is more we can do here, such as by improving the presentation of the downloadable data tables, and so this will continue to be a focus in 2026.

We strengthened our qualification price statistics in 2025 by expanding the range of qualifications in scope to include apprenticeship end-point assessments. To support user interpretation, we also included additional reference data, such as wage inflation, as comparisons. Following publication of the statistics we subsequently published granular standard qualification fee data to support qualification purchasers in making informed decisions and to bring enhanced transparency.

Many smaller-scale improvements have been made across our releases. Our main areas of focus have been on making them more transparent and user-friendly, adding in more of the kinds of statistics we understand users would like to see, such as proportions of students, where the data allows.

We have continued to strengthen some of our internal processes, enhancing the way we quality assure our analytical work and making our statistics production processes more efficient and robust, in line with the Government Analysis Function’s Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) strategy.

For nearly all our published statistics, we are reliant on the data provided to us by the awarding organisations we regulate. We have continued to work with the awarding organisations that supply data to us, to improve the accuracy of data used for statistical releases at source. To give one notable example, to support data quality and efficiency, we have been carrying out a project to review and improve the way we communicate our data requirements (see Submitting Data to Ofqual), making our specifications clearer, more consistent and more transparent. We will continue this project into 2026.

We released the second iteration of our Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) through the Office for National Statistics’ Secure Research Service. GRADE is a joint project between Ofqual, the Department for Education and UCAS, providing accredited external researchers with access to data to conduct independent research on the educational, assessment and admission systems in England. With this second iteration, data now covers the period from 2017 to 2022.

In response to the publication of the Code of Practice for Statistics edition 3.0, we have updated our policies and procedures for the production of official statistics. We have also developed an action plan for implementing some of the changes made to this new version of the Code, which informs some of the plans outlined below.

Our priorities for 2026

The following priorities reflect our focus at the time of publication. However, we remain responsive to emerging needs, meaning this plan may evolve during the year. Any updates will be reviewed and shared in next year’s publication.

We plan to continue some of the development work begun in 2025, including by:

• further developing our methodology for analysing and reporting on access arrangements statistics
• further enhancing our reporting of summer qualification results in line with the principles of intelligent transparency
• continuing to challenge other areas where we could be more transparent in our release of numbers, for example through Ofqual’s delivery report
• developing more of our background information documents with clarity, completeness and transparency in mind
• further improving our reviews of marking and moderation release, to promote better user understanding of these complex statistics
• formalising the ongoing publication of granular qualification fee data
• further developing our skills and processes, for example in line with the Government Analysis Function RAP strategy
• completing the project to review and improve our data specifications for our data suppliers
• continuing to enhance our compliance with the Code of Practice for statistics across all our statistical products, working towards gaining accredited status for more of our official statistics
• releasing the third iteration of our GRADE dataset in collaboration with our data partners, to cover the period from 2017 to 2024

A new priority for 2026 is a focus on improving our processes for gaining a better understanding of who the users of our statistical products might be and their needs from our products. We plan to strengthen our public involvement and engagement strategy and begin to carry those improvements out. This may include using a greater range of sources for gaining insights than we currently use, for example including media monitoring and considered use of website analytics, as well as more direct routes for engaging with users.

We are also working to improve the presentation of our GCSE grade outcomes by county and A Level outcomes by county interactive visualisations. We recognise that the current use of ceremonial counties (as defined by the Lord Lieutenancies Act 1997) may not be the most suitable for users. It also does not always support coherence with other sources of information, such as those produced by the Department for Education. We are currently exploring other options, such as administrative counties (local government areas responsible for public services). We hope to be able to make this change ahead of the next update of these visualisations in August 2026, or if not, in August 2027.

We are planning to publish a statistical release on malpractice in vocational and technical qualifications (VTQs) in quarter 2 of 2026, focusing on the 2024 to 2025 academic year. This will be the first time we have published data on this topic since our release on VTQ malpractice in the 2019 to 2020 academic year. 

We also plan to improve the timeliness of the next release of our statistics on apprenticeship end-point assessment outcomes, publishing earlier in the year, and strengthening the report in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics.

Feedback

We welcome any views you might have on this plan. To share any thoughts, please contact data.analytics@ofqual.gov.uk.

We also always welcome any feedback on our published statistics, as this helps us to better meet our users’ needs. To provide any feedback you may have, please complete our user survey.

Head of Profession for Statistics: Ben Cuff