Last Updated on October 11, 2026 by Karl Thompson
One of the supposed advantages of official statistics is that they are quick and easy to use to find out basic information.
To test this out, I used the following as a starter for my “official statistics” lesson with my A-level sociology students:
I printed the above off as a one-page handout and gave students 10 minutes to find the approximate answers to each of the questions.
If some students managed to find all of them in less than 10 minutes, they could reflect on the final question about validity. I didn’t expect all students to get to this, but all of them could benefit from it during class discussion after the task.
Official statistics starter: answers
Below are the answers to the questions, with the latest figures available in October 2026. (They’re here because they need regular updating!)
How many people are there in the UK?
About 69.5 million (69,487,000) in mid-2025. This is a provisional estimate.
Source: ONS, Provisional population estimate for the UK: mid-2025.
How many households are there in the UK?
29.0 million in 2025.
Source: ONS, Families and households in the UK: 2025.
How many marriages were there last year in the UK?
This one is harder than it looks! The most recent figure is for 2023, and it covers England and Wales only, not the whole UK. There were 231,949 marriages and civil partnerships in England and Wales in 2023, published in November 2025.
Source: ONS, Marriages in England and Wales: 2023.
This is a useful point in itself: official statistics are not always as up to date or as complete as you might expect. Marriage statistics run around two years behind, and Scotland and Northern Ireland publish their own.
How many cases of domestic abuse were there in England and Wales last year?
In the year ending March 2025, an estimated 7.8% of people aged 16 and over (around 3.8 million people) experienced domestic abuse in the last year, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The police recorded 834,256 domestic abuse-related offences in the year ending March 2026.
Source: ONS, Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2026.
Note the gap between the survey estimate (people who experienced abuse) and the police figure (offences recorded). They are measuring different things, but the difference tells you a lot about how much domestic abuse never reaches the police.
What proportion of GCSE grades were 4 or above this year, and how does this compare to last year?
67.3% of GCSE results were awarded 4/C or above in 2026, compared with 67.4% in 2025. These figures cover England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Source: JCQ, GCSE results press notice, summer 2026.
When I first wrote this post in 2020, the answer was very different: 79% of GCSE entries got 4 or above in 2020, up from 70% in 2019, because exams were cancelled and grades were based on teacher assessment. That’s a great example of how a change in the way something is measured can change the statistics, without any change in what students actually knew.
How many students sat an A-level in sociology last year?
There were 43,562 UK entries for A-level sociology in 2026.
Source: JCQ results statistics, summer 2026.
Do any of the above sources lack validity?
It’s hard to argue that the last two have poor validity as counts: an exam result was either awarded or it wasn’t. However, you can argue that they are not valid measurements of students’ ability, because of variations in the difficulty of the exams and a range of other factors. The 2020 results above show how much grades depend on how they are awarded.
With the domestic abuse statistics, there are several reasons why cases go unreported, such as fear and shame on the part of victims. Even the Crime Survey may not capture everything, because the abuser may be in the house when the survey interview takes place.
Marriages are a hard statistic, because marriages must be legally registered. The bigger problems are that the figures are out of date and don’t cover the whole UK.
In terms of households, validity is pretty high. However, definitions of what counts as a household can lead to different interpretations of the numbers.
The population statistics are an interesting one. We have records of births and deaths, but migration is much harder to measure, and people who enter or stay in the country without the authorities knowing are, by their nature, difficult to count. That’s one reason the mid-2025 estimate is labelled “provisional”.
The point of this starter and what comes next…
It’s a kinaesthetic demonstration of the practical advantages of official statistics, and it gives students a chance to think about validity for themselves. As the marriage question shows, it also gives them a taste of the practical limitations!
Following the starter, we cracked on with official statistics proper, considering in more depth the strengths and limitations of different types of official statistics, drawn from other parts of the A-level sociology specification. You can find all of that in my main post on Official Statistics in Sociology.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written primarily for teachers and students of research methods on the AQA’s A-level sociology course.
For the full topic, see Official Statistics in Sociology, which includes a ranking exercise on the validity of different official statistics that works well as a follow-up to this starter.
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