This year there has been an increase in the entries for science, additional science and for biology at GCSE and in the numbers of students achieving A* grades in biology.

Additional science has seen the greatest increase going up 10.5% from 332,960 candidates in 2015 to 368,033 in 2016. Science entries also increased by 3.3%.

Biology has seen an increase of 3.6% from 139,199 candidates in 2015 to 144,148 candidates this year. There was also positive news for numbers of entries for chemistry and physics: chemistry increased by 5.7% to 141,245 and physics increased by 4.6% to 139,805.

There has been a small increase in the numbers of students achieving an A* grade in biology: up 0.1% to 13.3% of all candidates. The A*-C grades were again fantastic with 90.5% of all biology candidates gaining an A*-C grade. This is only down by 0.4% from last year.

Students achieving A*-C grades in the single science qualification decreased with 52.9% achieving A*-C compared to 56.7% last year. For the additional science qualification, numbers of A*-C grades also decreased with 59.7% achieving this compared to 63.2% last year.