Everything you need to know about the new GCSE grades

As part of reforms to GCSEs in England, students will soon be graded in each subject on a new scale from 9 to 1.

The government hopes the system will make GCSEs more challenging and is being phased in between now and 2019.

To make it more complicated, that means students on Thursday will receive a mixture of letter and number grades, with only English literature, English language and maths adopting the new number system in 2017. All other subjects will still have letter grades. Still with us?

Another 20 subjects will switch to the 9 to 1 grading in 2018, with others following in 2019.

It is hoped the reforms will ‘better differentiate between students of different abilities’. The government has said fewer grade 9s (the highest possible) will be awarded than A*s (the previous highest grade). 

In the first year each new GCSE subject is introduced, ‘broadly the same proportion’ of students will get a grade 4 or above as would have got a grade C or above in the old system.

This little chart shows how the old grades roughly match up in comparison with the new ones:

So there we go. Click here for a fancy PDF of all the details.