Last week proved a harder week than usual in the UK. A nationwide drought with hosepipe bans in place in many counties saw our Home & Garden category rise by 14%. Daily rail strikes rendered one fifth of all train services obsolete across the week, and inflation continued to spiral out of control leaving Personal Finance content as an underlying growth constant once again.
However, it was not all doom and gloom as A-level results day brought smiles to many faces as a record number of 18 year olds secured their place at university.
Results revive back to school
Last week, engagement with our Education content doubled to 3.7m page views as the annual A Level results day took place. There was a special emphasis on this results day, with these exams being the first to be sat fully in person with no controversial government algorithms assigning grades. This led to a record number of 18 year olds getting into their top choice of universities.
It goes without saying that the national result days of both A-levels and GCSEs are of great focus across the nation. Education as a content category has a yearly average of 2.6m weekly page views, whereas the week of results day saw page views hit 3.6m, up +38% versus the average.
Unsurprisingly, the day of exam results being released creates a huge spike in consumption of Education content - up almost 3x versus the day prior. However, this peak has a relatively strong long-tail, with average daily page views for the three days after results day reaching 546k page views – this figure us up +55% versus the average for the three days prior.
The release of the latest exam results coincided with Scottish schools returning from their summer break, and for many will have acted as a reminder of the impending ‘Back to School’ season – we saw increases across many Education sub-content categories such as Primary Education (up five-fold week on week) and College Education (up +74% versus last week).
Take Action
After a summer lull, engagement with Education content was top of the class this week, peaking at levels even higher than during exam season. We expect to see these levels remain high as schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland return in early September – and parents seek advice on those all important school essentials.
Get weekly Reading the Nation notifications
If you LOVE Reading the Nation you can sign up to receive our weekly notifications here.
About Reading the Nation
Reading the Nation will connect you to our broadcast-scale audience - who we see across the Ozone platform in their millions day-in-day-out - to unearth insights into their habits and behaviours when topics start to trend or big stories break.
