GCSE entries for biology, physics and chemistry rise sharply while modern languages continue to decline
• GCSE results 2010: Live blog
Attempts to convince teenagers to study individual sciences has paid off, according to today's GCSE results, which show huge increases in the number of pupils taking the subjects.
Entries for chemistry and physics rose by 32%, while those for biology grew by 28%, figures from the Joint Council for Qualifications show.
About 690,000 pupils from England, Wales and Northern Ireland received their results today. This summer they took almost 5.4m GCSEs.
Modern foreign languages continued a decline that has sparked fears from the Confederation of British Industry that UK businesses will be increasingly forced to recruit from overseas to meet a demand for language speakers.
Almost 19% of students sat biology GCSE, while 17.5% took physics and 18% took chemistry. Last year, the proportion of students who took separate sciences rose, but less sharply. Entries for biology grew by 18%, while for chemistry and physics they rose by 20% and 21%.
Almost three-quarters of students did not sit French GCSE and entries for the subject dropped by 6% this year to just 177,618. Entries for German fell by 4.5% to 70,169, but entries for Spanish grew by almost 1% to 67,707.
Ministers scrapped languages as a requirement at GCSE in 2004. Since then, the number of students taking one has dropped by a third.
Entries for Chinese are up by 5% and those for Polish and Portuguese grew by 12% and 10% respectively.
The rise in sciences may reflect some universities' preference for separate sciences. It also continues a trend seen last week in the A-level results, where students were said to be trying to recession-proof themselves by shunning so-called soft subjects in favour of science, economics and maths.
"Softer" subjects are less popular, the GCSE results show. PE, business studies and drama entries dropped by 9%, 7% and 6% respectively. Some 11% of students took business studies.
Almost seven in 10 (69.1%) GCSEs were graded an A* to C, compared with 67.1% last year.
Andrew Hall, from the AQA exam board, said it was a "great day for the sciences but a sad one for languages". French GCSE is out of the top 10 most popular subjects for the "first time in living memory".