Results day has come and gone, and we hope with all our hearts here at the Psychology Blog that everyone who has just got their results will continue to get lots of interest and value out of your psychology knowledge and skills – either at school, if you are going into your second year, or in college or out in what psychologists tend to call the ‘real world’ (it isn’t noticeably realer, truth be told).

In this post we’ll take a first look at the results statistics for psychology this year. You can find the data at this link.

• Compared to last year, psychology numbers have gone down from 56,088 candidates last year to 54,818 this year – a drop of 1,270
• This is in the context of an overall drop in A Level candidate numbers of 17,000 students
• The drop in psychology numbers was not as significant as that for other large-cohort A Level subjects like English (-4,000) or General Studies (-7,600)
• Subjects seeing the biggest rises in numbers were biology, chemistry and physics. Maths saw an increase, but so did Religious Studies (both grew by about 800 candidates)
• Psychology is the fourth largest A Level subject still, with chemistry nipping at our heels: 53,513 candidates so 2,575 candidates behind.

More analysis to follow once the boards have released their individual results statistics.