A zero in the data can mean several quite different things. The data cannot tell you which.
Six ordinary explanations
- Nobody chose it. The course was on the option block and recruited no students, or too few to run.
- It ran, but elsewhere. Consortium and partnership arrangements are common at post-16; students may be taught at one institution and entered through another.
- Timing. A cohort part-way through a two-year course produces no entries in the intervening year.
- A different label. The same subject matter may be entered under another qualification family — Business appears at A-level and as an Applied General subject.
- A different route. Some institutions provide a subject at Level 2, or through a qualification outside this release.
- It genuinely is not provided. Which is often the case — but the data cannot separate this from the five above.
What the Explorer does about it
Where the map shows institutions without entries, they are drawn as faint rings and labelled no entries recorded in 2025. They are counted in the denominator, because they are active post-16 institutions — but nothing is claimed about their curriculum.
A note on consortium arrangements
Sixth-form consortia and partnerships are a real feature of post-16 provision, and they complicate the picture. 10 such entities appear in this data as institutions in their own right — and because they have no single site, they carry no coordinates and appear on no map.
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.