Macclesfield GCSE results 2026: Cheshire East reports 66%

Cheshire East Council says 66 per cent of its pupils passed GCSE English and maths this summer. It published that provisional figure on results day, Thursday 20 August, and described the year as “another year of strong performance”. (Cheshire East Council media release, 20 August 2026)

That one number is close to everything the public has been given. Not one state secondary in Macclesfield, Wilmslow, Knutsford or Poynton published a percentage of its own. Several published nothing at all.

The council’s 66%, set against the official record

The council’s measure is the standard one: the share of pupils reaching grade 4 or above in English and maths together. The Department for Education publishes exactly the same measure for every local authority, and its most recent figures are for the 2024/25 school year.

For all state-funded schools in Cheshire East, those figures are:

• 2024/25: 67.8% at grade 4 or above in English and maths
• 2023/24: 67.8%
• 2022/23: 67.4%

So the provisional 66% announced this month sits below each of the borough’s last three published years. (DfE, Key stage 4 performance)

Two cautions before that is read as a decline. Provisional results-day counts and the DfE’s revised statistics are compiled differently, and the council’s release does not say which schools it covers. The DfE will not publish its own figures for summer 2026 until later this year, so no like-for-like comparison exists yet.

On the same 2024/25 basis, England stood at 64.8% and the North West at 62.3%. Cheshire East was comfortably above both.

The number the borough does less well on

There is a second measure, and it is the one that gets quoted as “grades 9 to 5”: the share of pupils reaching grade 5 or above in English and maths, often called a strong pass.

On that measure Cheshire East recorded 45.1% in 2024/25, down from 47.4% the year before. England was 45.4%. So the borough that beats the national average by three points on the standard pass falls just below it on the strong pass, and it moved the wrong way while England barely moved at all.

Among the 23 North West authorities in 2024/25, Cheshire East ranked:

• 2nd on grade 4 or above in English and maths (67.8%), behind Trafford on 79.2%
• 4th on grade 5 or above (45.1%), behind Trafford, Stockport (48.9%) and Warrington (47.9%)
• joint 3rd on Attainment 8 (47.1 points, level with Stockport), and 47th of 152 authorities in England

What the local schools published

Five of the seven state secondaries in the area posted something on results day. None of them published a percentage.

• All Hallows Catholic College, Macclesfield: a full press release celebrating the year group, with no figures. It ends by saying the college “joins other Cheshire East schools in focusing on celebrating the achievements, destinations and individual successes of students, rather than publishing comparative school performance tables”. (All Hallows, GCSE results 2026)
• The Fallibroome Academy, Macclesfield: “another superb set of GCSE results”, and the closest thing to a statistic anyone gave. It reports 28 students who achieved grades 9, 8 or 7 in eight or more subjects, and names 29 more who made the strongest progress since Year 7. (Fallibroome Academy)
• The Macclesfield Academy: says it recorded its best-ever Attainment 8 score and its best science results, but publishes neither number. It also reports its highest-ever number of students moving on to Sir John Deane’s Sixth Form College. (The Macclesfield Academy)
• Tytherington School, Macclesfield: a long celebration of individual students, with no school-level figure. (Tytherington School)
• Knutsford Academy: its results-day news item, dated 19 August, is a single image with no text. (Knutsford Academy)
• Wilmslow High School: no results-day item at all. Its school performance page still ends at 2025. (Wilmslow High School)
• Poynton High School: no 2026 item. The most recent news post on its site is the 2025 results. (Poynton High School)

That is not carelessness, and All Hallows says so openly. It is a shared position among Cheshire East schools. It is worth naming plainly, because it means the council’s single provisional percentage is the only local figure a parent can look at.

The two schools that did publish numbers

Both are fee-charging.

The King’s School in Macclesfield published a detailed set. It reports 64% of all GCSE grades at 9 to 7, 42% at 9 or 8, and 85% at 9 to 6. It says 80% of pupils got at least one grade 9 or 8, and a third achieved at least nine grades at 9 to 7. (The King’s School)

For context, Ofqual’s national figures put independent schools at 47.1% of results at grade 7 and above in 2026, so King’s is reporting well clear of its own sector.

Beech Hall School, also in Macclesfield, gives 85% of candidates with five or more passes in 2026, against 67% in 2025. Its results page carries no subject detail, and its descriptive text repeats the same wording for every year back to 2022, so treat it as a headline only. (Beech Hall School)

Alderley Edge School for Girls’ last results day

Thursday was the final GCSE results day in the school’s history. Alderley Edge School for Girls announced a proposed closure in February and shut to pupils on 26 June. From 1 September only staff covering the final closure of the business remain.

The school’s own account of why is unusually direct. Its board says pupil numbers had fallen steadily, with 100 pupils lost in the last two years alone, and lists four cost pressures: higher operating costs, VAT on school fees, the loss of business rates relief, and increased National Insurance contributions. It says it explored restructuring and pursued buyers and educational partners, and that a rescue proposal from a parent group was judged not viable because it depended on unconfirmed funding, asset sales, speculative planning approvals and at least three more years of trading losses. (Alderley Edge School for Girls closure update)

The school kept staff on site on results day to help families. It published an A level press release on 13 August but no GCSE figures. Its accounts for the year to 31 August 2025 are overdue at Companies House; group accounts to 31 August 2024 were finally filed on 28 July this year. (Companies House, company 02659703)

The national picture, and why the North West matters here

Ofqual published its summer 2026 statistics the same morning. Across all ages in England, 67.0% of GCSE results were at grade 4 or above and 21.8% at grade 7 or above. Restricted to 16-year-olds, which strips out college resits, those rise to 70.7% and 23.1%. (Ofqual, Qualification results in England, summer 2026)

The North West is the weaker end of that table. For 16-year-olds it recorded 67.9% at grade 4 or above and 20.1% at grade 7 or above, second lowest of the nine English regions on both, above only the West Midlands.

One warning about mixing these up. Ofqual counts the percentage of results across all subjects. The council counts the percentage of pupils who passed two specific subjects. They are different measures and should never be set against each other, however tempting the numbers look side by side.

Ofqual’s centre-type table is the fairer comparison for a fee-charging school, and it is stark:

The bottom two rows are resit centres, not failing institutions. Almost everyone sitting a GCSE there is retaking English or maths after missing a grade 4.

Why there is no Progress 8 score this year

Parents comparing schools this autumn will find a gap in the tables, and there is a simple reason for it.

Progress 8 measures how far pupils travel between their Key Stage 2 SATs and their GCSEs. This year group sat no SATs, because primary tests were cancelled during the pandemic. As Wilmslow High School puts it on its own performance page, “Progress 8 is not used in 2025 or 2026 as these cohorts did not sit end of KS2 SATs”.

Attainment 8, which measures results alone, is unaffected.

What it means for you

If a grade looks wrong. Two services are available, and both close on 24 September 2026:

• a clerical re-check, completed within 10 calendar days, which confirms every part of the paper was marked and the marks were added up and recorded correctly
• a review of marking, completed within 20 calendar days, which includes the clerical checks and a review of the marking itself

Requests go through the school’s exams officer, not the family, and the student’s written consent must be held on file. There is no grade protection: a grade can go down as well as up. The faster priority service that ran to 20 August covers A levels, T Levels and Level 3 vocational qualifications only, not GCSEs. (JCQ post-results services)

If a resit is the plan. The November series is close. Pearson Edexcel’s final timetable puts the main papers on these mornings:

• English Language Paper 1: Tuesday 3 November
• Mathematics Paper 1, non-calculator: Wednesday 4 November
• English Language Paper 2: Thursday 5 November
• Mathematics Paper 2, calculator: Friday 6 November
• Mathematics Paper 3, calculator: Monday 9 November

Entries are made by the centre, so the conversation to have this week is with the school or the college taking the student in September. (Pearson Edexcel GCSE November 2026 timetable)

If the next step is unclear. The council points students to its Youth Support Service, reachable through the Cheshire East website.

Families weighing up a move around a school place may also want our guide to house prices across Cheshire East, and the planning news page tracks the schemes that bring new school places with them.