Music A level grading 2026
A year ago, I published a blog post on Music A level grading after discovering evidence that Music A level students are absolutely knocking it out of the park in all their other A levels . The post, A parting of the ways: attainment and reward in A level music grading, sets out a case for rewarding Music A level students more generously on three main grounds:
- Students taking Music A level are drawn from the high end of the attainment spectrum and this should, but does not at the moment, show up in Music grades.
- Students taking Music A level systematically receive fewer A*/As in Music than in their other subjects.
- The effect of 1 and 2 is felt particularly strongly in comprehensive schools.
A year later, has anything changed? I won't rehearse the full argument again, but with upgraded visuals for 2026, this is where we stand:
Out of the park
Once again, students who take Music are scoring sixes all over the place in their other subjects. The five subjects marked with an asterisk are, in fact, understating the overperformance of Music students.
Who does better in Maths? The physicist or the musician?
As last year, the correlation with high attainment in Maths is stronger for students who also take Music than for students who also take Physics. Other notable correlations:
- The correlation with achievement in any science is stronger when the student also takes Music than when they take any other science.
- This extends to essay subjects, with Music beating the weightiest essay subjects for attainment correlation.
I think it's worth adding one argument to last year's essay. To my mind these charts show clearly that Music students are strongly high attaining and that something is off in the grading of Music. There is, of course, an alternative explanation: that Music is taken by high attaining students whose musical output pales in comparison to their brilliance in English or Maths (etc.).
For this to be the case, Music would need to be taken, as a feature of the landscape, by bright but relatively unmusical students. I don't think that is a credible scenario.
Let's play hunt the A*
Only 118 A*s went to comprehensive schools. Once again this is under one per local authority and you only need five to ten outliers (like Graveney School's 6 A*s in 2024) before half of local authorities do not have a single student gaining an A* in Music A level in a state school.
FWIW many independent schools also find the grading of Music A level a challenge. Around 167 A*s spread across the independent sector still works out at a fraction of an A* per school, a fraction lowered as a result of the handful of large, highly specialist music schools among the independents.
The case of Art
This year I also looked a bit more deeply into Fine Art, a subject that sits close to the top of the spectrum for its share of A*/A grades. What does Fine Art tell us about the system's ability to reward a domain-specific talent? Or does all grading need to ride on general attainment in subjects dominated by answers in numbers and letters?
Taking Fine Art, it turns out, doesn't predict particularly high attainment in other subjects. What is going on here, presumably, is that Fine Art grading rewards the quality of students' art rather than riding on general attainment. Good for Fine Art.
Now why can't the system do the same for Music?
Can we see the impact across the spectrum?
Last year I pointed out that music students gain more A*s and As in their other subjects than they do in music. I wondered what a Sankey diagram would show us about how Music grading would change if Music students were, on average, awarded grades in Music in line with the grades they achieve elsewhere. The diagram below shows what this looks like for the 20 subjects most often taken with Music.
The patterns outlined here may help explain why the issue hasn't registered with Ofqual as a problem in the grading of Music A level. There does not appear to be a significant problem for the bottom third of candidates — indeed, under equal grading a small number would move down rather than up. There is something going on for the middle third.
For the top third however there is a stark issue and equal grading would change a third of the grades for the top third of students. Seen in aggregate, the picture might not move you to consider any changes. To my mind, the detail looks like a problem and I hope it will be useful for line managers in understanding the national picture in which Music A level teachers are operating.
The knock on effects
Most obviously, the patterns seen here are not great news for Music students or their teachers but I think it's important to touch on the wider consequences of Music's grading being out of kilter. In state secondary schools (the area of the sector I know) the informal and co-curricular musical life of a school depends on the success of the formal life. This is not the case in PE. It is in Music.
Influence and 'course existence' in schools are closely wrapped up with exam result delivery. When you serve 70% 7+ on a plate at GCSE, then your relative weight in the school hierarchy increases. A second order consequence might be that it magically becomes easier to persuade the school to allow rehearsals for the Christmas concert to take place during working hours. Conversely, if your A level cohort get their weakest grades in your subject then a chunk of your time and attention is redirected to simply arguing for the subject to exist. A level in Y12 and Y13 is enough timetable time to justify half an extra teacher, often the difference between single person and two person departments. It is *much* easier to build a whole school culture of good music if you are not on your own.
This is the reason I've sunk weeks into analysing this data and why I hope that the argument is convincing enough to be aired more widely and help the sector persuade the powers that be to change things for the better.
