Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of young people in north Cornwall did not complete secondary education to GCSE level in each year since 2010.

The closest information the Department publishes is the percentage of pupils, at the end of Key Stage 4, who passed at least one GCSE or equivalent qualification; this is published in the Key Stage 4 statistical first releases[1]. The remaining percentage from this figure are those who did not pass any qualifications. The Department publishes these figures at a local authority level, the closest available figures to ‘north Cornwall’ are those for ‘Cornwall’. There have been some methodological changes over the years, details of these are available in the main text and footnotes of each statistical first release[2].

[1] Figures for 2009/10 – 2014/15 are available within ‘table 16’ of the additional/local authority tables in the ‘revised’ publications from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-gcses-key-stage-4 (table 15 for 2013/14). The ‘any passes’ column provides the figures. For 2015/16 – 2016/17, the figures are available from https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/download-data (select the year, Local authority (Cornwall), ‘Final key stage 4’ (revised, for 2016/17) and download the Excel file. The column ‘PTANYQ_PTQ_EE’ is required; figures for Cornwall are in the row labelled as rectype 4, the figures for England are labelled rectype 7. Rectype is found in column A.

[2] In the revised publications for each year, from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-gcses-key-stage-4, the SFR text and main national tables contain an explanation of how the figures are generated for that year. These changes mean that figures between years can not always be directly compared.