Private schools have seen a greater fall in the proportion of top grades at A-level than the state sector this year, it has emerged.
The proportion of A and A* grades awarded to private school pupils fell by 12.4 percentage points to 58 per cent, whilst at comprehensive schools top grades fell by 8.7 percentage points to 30.7 per cent.
Last year, schools awarded teacher-assessed grades following the cancellation of exams because of Covid disruption. This saw a rise in top grades, with the proportion of As and A*s handed out at private schools rising by 9.3 percentage points compared with a 6.2 percentage point rise for comprehensives.
Barnaby Lenon, the chairman of the Independent Schools’ Council, said the fall was not because private schools had been overly generous in producing teacher-assessed grades the previous year.
He added: “Ofqual looked at that question themselves last year, they looked closely at schools who might have been thought to be over-predicting and concluded ... they were satisfied that the grades that were awarded were correct.
“That this drop is greater than some other types of school is expected because independent school students are more clustered at top end of grade scale where there has been most grade deflation.”
The Sutton Trust, an education charity, raised concerns that regional gaps were growing and the differences in levels of achievement at private schools compared with state schools and colleges were still above 2019 levels.
The charity pointed out that while 58 per cent of grades at private schools were A or above, the figure was 35 per cent at academy schools and 32 per cent at sixth forms.
While A-level entries awarded A* and A grades in London rose to 39 per cent from 26.9 per cent in 2019, in north east England the figure was 30.8 per cent this year, up from 23 per cent in 2019.
Sir Peter Lampl, the Sutton Trust and Education Endowment Foundation chairman, said: “It’s great to see that many disadvantaged youngsters are gaining a place at university, and that there is a slight narrowing of the gap between the most and least advantaged.
“Universities have rightly prioritised widening participation in spite of an extremely competitive year. However, the gap is still wider than it was pre-pandemic, highlighting that there is more work to be done.
“The data also shows that there are regional disparities in attainment. The Government must work to ensure that students from all backgrounds, in all areas of the country, have the opportunity to succeed.”
Recent analysis by The Telegraph showed that, for the first time on record, teenagers from the most affluent backgrounds were the least likely of any socio-economic group to have received a university offer.
Prestigious universities such as Oxford and Cambridge have also pledged to admit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds, leading to fears of discrimination against pupils from fee-paying schools.
Stephen Toope, the outgoing vice-chancellor of Cambridge, said in May that the university was “intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford and Cambridge”.
Mr Lenon said on Thursday that he welcomed contextual admissions offers – when universities take the socio-economic background of applicants into account – but added that universities should be wary of alienating students from more affluent backgrounds.
He said contextual offers were “a perfectly reasonable thing”, and were also used by independent schools when assessing potential pupils.
“What we and the public all want is for universities to take those students who have the greatest potential, and that means looking at the context of the individual child and interpreting their exam grades accordingly,” he added.
“The only things we don’t like are universities that actually put middle-class applicants off by focusing so much on disadvantaged students, or who fail to make their admissions policies clear on their websites – certain students don't quite know whether they’re welcome to apply or not.
“I’m entirely in favour of Cambridge making lower offers, let’s say, to a student who looks very good but goes to a school with a very poor A-level track record. But at the same time, they surely don’t want to put off very bright middle-class pupils who may also have very great potential.”
