There has been a slight increase in the GCSE pass rate and the percentage of top grades this year, despite concerns about the difficulty of exams. The pass rate edged up to 67.3% in England, Wales and Northern Ireland - up 0.4 percentage points on last year.
The percentage of papers given a top grade (7 or A and above) rose 0.3 percentage points to 20.8% on 2018. England's exams regulator Ofqual and the exams board insist they are keeping standards the same over time through a system of comparable outcomes.
Exam boards do this by making adjustments to grade boundaries during the marking process, having married the difficulty of papers with the predicted ability of the group of students sitting the exams.
This means the percentages achieving different grades nationally never changes very much from year to year.
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