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forward slash mug. Hello and welcome to Coffey House Shots, the Spectators Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy Yu and today I'm joined by James Hill and Amanda Spielberg who was chair of off call and also chair of offset

So Amanda welcome to the Coffee House Shots podcast today obviously is GCSE results day

What were some of the headlines that stood out to you about this day in particular?

First of all it was good to see relative stability. I think that's what everybody

needs a feeling that we're back to a steady baseline, something that gives everybody who uses

results confidence from year to year on how they use them. So that's that's very good

news. The other thing I saw was the North versus South story reappearing and that's an

interesting one because I don't think it's quite what it seems in fact there's been

some pretty good research on this.

Firstly, it's really a North versus London.

And secondly, demographics account for quite a bit of that.

And thirdly, when you dig into it,

you find that actually very little is accounted for

by regional effects.

Much more of it is about much more local effects

and even within school differences. So the policy levers to address the

differences probably aren't the apparently obvious ones of putting more money

...