The number of students achieving straight grade 9s in their GCSEs has increased by 14.3 per cent this year.

A total of 837 pupils who took seven or more GCSEs achieved the top grade in all of their subjects, compared with 732 last year - and two-thirds were girls.

According to today’s results, 4.5 per cent of all GCSE entries in England achieved a grade 9, with 5.2 per cent of female entries achieving this grade compared with 3.7 per cent of boys.

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Grade 9 is the highest GCSE score of the new 9-1 grading system, introduced in England in 2017. This year the new grades have been awarded in an additional 25 subjects.

New GCSE grading system

It is higher than the legacy A* grade, and is only awarded to the top 20 per cent of those achieving grade 7/A and above.

According to figures released today, of the 837 students who achieved straight grade 9s this year, 556 - 66.4 per cent - were girls, and 281 - 33.6 per cent - were boys.

That means a higher proportion of clean sweep successes were girls this year - in 2018, the figure was 62 per cent.

The number of students with straight 9s in 12 subjects has doubled this year to 10. However, this may be attributable to an increased number of subjects graded as 9-1 this year.

Explaining the rise in the number of pupils with high scores in all subjects, a spokesperson for Ofqual said: “This data applies to 16-year-olds with straight 9s in seven or more of their GCSEs.

“An important consideration, of course, is that this year there are more GCSE subjects that are being graded 9-1, and that makes a comparison with last year a little tricky.”