This report is focused on the uptake of GCSE subjects in England in 2021. Uptake in a GCSE subject is defined as the number or percentage of students at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4) taking the subject. This report was produced using publicly available data from the Department for Education's (DfE) "Find and compare schools in England" service. The data set consisted of KS4 entry numbers in all GCSE subjects in England. Other school information, such as schools' sex composition, school type, and admissions policy, was also available. However, some data (available in previous years) was not available in the 2021 dataset, including GCSE grades achieved and the percentage of disadvantaged students in each school. This data was not available because the DfE did not want schools to be held to account for their students' performance in 2021 due to the disruption in learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant that the authors were not able to produce the tables in this report with breakdowns by school level attainment or deprivation using 2021 data. Instead, the decision was made to use data (for these tables only) from the 2019 data set. It was assumed that for most schools, the average attainment and the percentage of disadvantaged students would not change significantly in two years and so the 2019 data would be a reasonable proxy for 2021. Only GCSEs (9-1) full course (both single and double award) were counted for this report. GCSE uptake is presented by the following school classifications: school type, school attainment, school deprivation level, and school sex composition.