Bury's Attainment 8 is 43.6 and 38.9% reached grade 5 in English and maths. Steady, but steady at the level the borough dropped to last year.
Bury’s Year 11 results held their level this summer. The borough recorded:
- an Attainment 8 score of 43.6
- 38.9 per cent of students at grade 9 to 5 in both English and maths
Bury Council published the figures on results day, 20 August. It collected them from all 13 mainstream high schools in the borough.
The council called the results “broadly in line with the 2025 results”. That is accurate. It is also the part worth reading twice.
Government figures published in April put Bury’s Attainment 8 for the 2024/25 school year at 43.4. They put the share of pupils reaching grade 5 in English and maths at 38.9 per cent, the identical figure to this summer. The year before that, Bury was on 45.0 and 43.5 per cent.
In other words, the borough is holding a level it fell to twelve months ago.
The fall nobody reported at the time
Bury’s 2024/25 results were the steepest drop of any of the ten Greater Manchester boroughs, on both headline measures. The figures come from the Department for Education’s key stage 4 performance statistics, which cover all state-funded schools and are published on the same per-pupil basis the council used on results day.
| Borough | Attainment 8, 2023/24 | Attainment 8, 2024/25 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bury | 45.0 | 43.4 | -1.6 |
| Stockport | 47.9 | 47.1 | -0.8 |
| Trafford | 58.3 | 57.9 | -0.4 |
| Bolton | 45.8 | 45.7 | -0.1 |
| Oldham | 42.4 | 42.3 | -0.1 |
| Rochdale | 40.5 | 40.6 | +0.1 |
| Wigan | 43.2 | 43.4 | +0.2 |
| Manchester | 44.5 | 44.8 | +0.3 |
| Tameside | 42.8 | 43.5 | +0.7 |
| Salford | 41.6 | 42.9 | +1.3 |
| England | 45.9 | 46.0 | +0.1 |
On the English and maths measure the pattern is sharper still. Bury lost 4.6 percentage points in a single year, from 43.5 to 38.9. No other Greater Manchester borough lost more than 3.3. England slipped 0.5, from 45.9 to 45.4.
That moved Bury from a borough sitting just under the national average to one sitting well below it:
- Attainment 8: 0.9 points below England in 2023/24, 2.6 points below in 2024/25
- Grade 5 in English and maths: 2.4 points below England in 2023/24, 6.5 points below in 2024/25
Bury is now 3.1 points below the North West average of 42.0 per cent on the English and maths measure. Two years ago it was above it.
What this summer’s number does and does not tell you
The 2026 figures are the council’s own collation, and the council says plainly that they are initial and “subject to change following remarks/appeals”. Grade boundaries are challenged every year and the number will move.
There is also no national comparison available for this summer. The Department for Education does not publish Attainment 8 or the English and maths measure for the current school year until October. Any “national average” quoted against a 2026 Attainment 8 score today is either last year’s figure or a different measure entirely. We have used the DfE’s own 2024/25 figures above, and labelled them as such, rather than compare this summer’s Bury number with a national one that does not yet exist.
One measure has gone missing altogether. Progress 8 showed how far pupils moved between primary and GCSE, and it was the fairest way to compare schools with different intakes. It cannot be calculated at all this year. Department for Education guidance updated on 16 October 2025 states: “It is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024 to 2025 and 2025 to 2026, as there is no Key Stage 2 (KS2) prior attainment data available.” Primary tests were cancelled in 2020 and 2021, so this year group and the last one have no starting point on record.
You can see the effect on a Bury school’s own page. The Elton High School’s GCSE results page lists its 2025 Attainment 8 as 44.2 and its grade 5 English and maths figure as 37.4 per cent. Against Progress 8 it simply prints “n/a”.
Without it, every published table this year and next measures attainment only. Schools with more advantaged intakes will look stronger, and schools that move pupils furthest will have nothing to show for it.
No Bury school has published its own 2026 results
We checked all 14 secondary school websites listed on Bury Council’s find a school page on 23 August. Not one had published a GCSE figure for this summer.
Two schools had put up a results-day page without numbers. The Derby High School’s results day page celebrates named students and the school’s vocational and BTEC offer but gives no pass rates. Hazel Wood High School’s homepage carried the collection arrangements, results available in person from 9.30am to 11.30am on 20 August, and nothing since.
Where results pages carry numbers, they are last year’s or older. Woodhey High School’s homepage shows an Attainment 8 of 47.1, a grade 5 English and maths figure of 47.2 per cent and a Progress 8 score of +0.05. Progress 8 has not been calculated for 2024/25 or 2025/26. That set of figures is therefore older than the school year just finished, and nothing on the page says so.
So the council’s borough-wide figures are the only published numbers for this summer. There is no way yet to see which Bury schools sit behind the borough average and which are carrying it. School-level data for 2025/26 arrives with the DfE performance tables in October.
A caution for when it does: schools report results on bases that are not comparable with each other. Some quote a percentage of grades, some a percentage of pupils, some English and maths together. Ranking them against each other, or against Ofqual’s national results-day figures, compares different things.
What it means for you
If your child got their results last week and is happy with them, nothing here changes that. These are borough averages and they say nothing about any individual result.
If you are choosing a secondary school this autumn, applications for Year 7 places starting September 2027 open on 1 September 2026 and close on 31 October 2026, according to Bury Council. The performance data you will be looking at covers 2024/25, the year Bury fell. Read it knowing there is no Progress 8 figure beside it, so a school’s raw score reflects who it admits as much as how it teaches.
If your child missed a grade 4 in English or maths, they have to keep studying it. The Department for Education’s condition of funding sets two routes:
- grade 3: must study towards a GCSE
- grade 2 or below: may take either a GCSE or a Functional Skills level 2 qualification
Ask the sixth form or college which route it is putting your child on before term starts.
If you think a grade is wrong, reviews of marking run to a deadline and a challenged grade takes weeks to resolve, so raise it with the school now rather than in September. A review can move a grade down as well as up.
If you want the underlying figures, the DfE data used here is the “geography by school types” dataset in the key stage 4 performance statistics, covering all state-funded schools.
Bury’s A level and vocational results this summer are in our results day report. For the council’s own services, see our guides to Bury planning applications and what is on across the borough.
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