Explained · Post-16 provisionDoes an exam entry prove a school offers a subject?
Almost — but the logic only runs in one direction, and that asymmetry is the single most important thing to understand about this data.
England · 2024/25 · DfEPlain-English guide
One direction: entries to teaching
An entry is a record of something that happened. Students sat the exam, which means they were taught, which means the institution had a teacher, a timetable slot and a cohort. So an entry is very strong evidence of active provision. It is not quite proof — a student might be taught elsewhere and entered through the institution — but it is close.
The other direction: no entries to no course
This does not follow at all. There are several ordinary reasons an institution might teach a subject and record no entries:
- The course was advertised but recruited too few students to run that year.
- It ran, but the cohort was entered through a partner institution or consortium.
- Students were entered in a different academic year.
- The subject is taught but assessed under a different qualification or subject label.
The Explorer therefore labels these institutions no entries recorded in 2025, never “does not offer”.
Why this matters more for small subjects
For a subject like Mathematics, present in 95.4% of A-level institutions, the gap between entries and offers is small — almost everywhere that teaches it enters students every year. For a subject with a median cohort of two, a single year with no takers produces a zero. The smaller the typical cohort, the more likely a zero means “not this year” rather than “not here”.
Related guides
Sources & methodology: All figures come from the DfE’s
Schools and colleges — subject entries and grades and
institution information data sets for academic year 2024/25 (final), joined on school URN. Only the
Total exam entries category is used, so no entry is counted twice. Coverage is measured against the number of institutions with recorded entries in the relevant qualification family, not against all establishments. Sixth-form consortia and partnership centres are excluded from all totals, denominators and percentages, because DfE excludes them from its national figures; they remain listed and flagged in the Explorer. On that basis the England A-level total of 787,688 entries reconciles with the
DfE national comparator to within
0.16%, and the four families together to within 0.15%. Institution coordinates come from
Get Information About Schools. T Levels do not appear in this release; they are shown separately on the Explorer’s T Levels tab, from DfE provider-level T Level results, and are never added to any entry total here.
Last checked 17 August 2026. Observed provision is based on recorded exam entries. An institution with no recorded entries in a subject may still have offered it — see what subject provision means.