It shows that the number of approved qualification award requests – for pupils who were absent from exams for good reason – dropped by a third, from 24,685 in 2017 to 16,960 this summer.
The exams regulator said recent changes to exams, which have resulted in fewer qualifications using coursework, could have prompted the decrease in the number of approved qualification award requests, which make up a small proportion of approved requests.
This fall comes despite the threshold being lowered last year to allow special consideration for pupils who had completed at least 25 per cent of their overall assessment, rather than 40 per cent.
Meanwhile, the number of approved mark adjustment requests continued to rise in 2018.
However, the most common mark adjustment, for candidates who were present for the assessment but disadvantaged in some way, has fallen to two per cent of the maximum mark, whereas last year it was three per cent.
According to Ofqual, a mark adjustment of two per cent is likely to be applied for candidates who are ill or under extreme stress at the time of the assessment, whilst three per cent is often reserved for cases involving “recent traumatic experience or domestic crisis”.