A-Level Maths Tutor: One Syllabus, Five Boards

A-Level Mathematics is a two-year linear qualification whose entire subject content is set by the Department for Education rather than by the exam board: the detailed content statements "represent 100% of the content", so AQA (7357), Pearson Edexcel (9MA0), OCR A (H240), OCR B MEI (H640) and WJEC all teach the same syllabus. Boards differ in how they assess it, not in what they cover. It is the UK's most popular A-level, with 115,380 entries in 2026.

Why is the A-Level Maths syllabus identical on every exam board?

The Department for Education publishes one subject-content document for AS and A level mathematics, and it leaves an awarding body almost nothing to decide. The detailed content statements are introduced with a single sentence that settles the question: "A level specifications in mathematics must include the following content. This, assessed in the context of the overarching themes, represents 100% of the content." Nineteen lettered sections follow, A to S — proof, algebra and functions, coordinate geometry, sequences and series, trigonometry, exponentials and logarithms, differentiation, integration, numerical methods and vectors, then statistical sampling through to moments in mechanics. A board may not add a topic and may not drop one.

The marking priorities are fixed centrally too. AQA states that assessment objectives "are set by Ofqual and are the same across all A-level Mathematics specifications and all exam boards", and both AQA and OCR publish the same split: AO1, using and applying standard techniques, carries 50% of the marks; AO2, reasoning and communicating mathematically, 25%; AO3, problem solving and modelling, 25%. Half the marks in A-Level Maths are for routine procedure carried out accurately. That is worth knowing before a student spends a term on the hardest questions in the book.

How unusual this is becomes obvious next to the sister qualification. The DfE's further mathematics document says the opposite: "A level further mathematics has a prescribed core which must comprise approximately 50% of its content", with the remaining half made up of options each board defines for itself. That is why a Further Maths student must know their board's option pair before they can even plan revision, and an A-Level Maths student does not. Our A-Level Further Maths guide sets out those option rules board by board.

So the folklore is wrong in one direction and right in another. Choosing AQA over Edexcel does not make A-Level Maths easier; there is no syllabus advantage to chase, and a textbook written for another board covers your topics. What does not transfer is the paper structure, the large data set and the house question style — and those are exactly where board-specific revision earns its keep.

Which paper carries mechanics, and which carries statistics?

All four English specifications examine A-Level Maths in three papers sat at the end of Year 13, with no coursework and nothing banked from Year 12. Past that point they diverge, and the divergence decides which paper a particular weakness damages.

Read that table against a student's own weakest strand and the numbers stop being abstract. Someone who cannot do mechanics loses at most Section B of Edexcel Paper 3, and the damage is contained: Papers 1 and 2 are pure only, so a bad mechanics day cannot reach them. The same student on MEI meets mechanics inside Paper 1, where it is worth 41 to 47 of that paper's 100 marks and the paper itself carries 36.4% of the A level, and there is no pure-only paper anywhere on the specification to retreat to. On AQA and OCR A the applied content is spread across two of the three papers, so no single sitting is decisive — but equally there is no paper a student can walk into having ignored an applied strand.

MEI is worth knowing about even if you sit another board, because it is the only A-Level Maths specification that examines reading. Component 03 gives 60 of its 75 marks to pure mathematics and the remaining 15 to questions on "a previously unseen comprehension passage based on the pure mathematics content of the specification". OCR is explicit about why the passage is pure rather than applied: to ensure that mechanics and statistics are not over-assessed in some years. Students who have only ever rehearsed standard question types find those 15 marks the hardest part of a paper worth 27.3% of the qualification.

WJEC sits outside the comparison entirely. Its GCE Mathematics is approved by Qualifications Wales and is unitised rather than linear, with four compulsory units: AS Unit 1 Pure Mathematics A (2 hours 30 minutes, 120 marks, 25% of the A level), AS Unit 2 Applied Mathematics A (1 hour 45 minutes, 75 marks, 15%, split Section A statistics 40 marks and Section B mechanics 35 marks), A2 Unit 3 Pure Mathematics B (2 hours 30 minutes, 120 marks, 35%) and A2 Unit 4 Applied Mathematics B (1 hour 45 minutes, 80 marks, 25%, split statistics 40 marks and differential equations and mechanics 40 marks). The specification confirms that "assessment opportunities will be available in the summer assessment period each year", so a Welsh student can sit AS units in Year 12 instead of facing everything at the end of Year 13. WJEC also hands learners a decision the English boards do not: on both applied units the total time "can be split between Section A and Section B as learners deem appropriate".

Can a student drop statistics or mechanics at A-Level Maths?

No, and the question is asked often enough to deserve a direct answer. Both applied strands sit inside the DfE's prescribed 100%. Sections K to O cover statistical sampling, data presentation and interpretation, probability, statistical distributions and statistical hypothesis testing. Sections P to S cover quantities and units in mechanics, kinematics, forces and Newton's laws, and moments. There is no legal combination of A-Level Maths papers on any English board that omits either strand, and WJEC makes both compulsory at AS as well as at A2.

This is the clearest boundary between A-Level Maths and A-Level Further Maths, and it is not a boundary of difficulty. Further Maths is a separate qualification with its own DfE content document, half of it optional, which is why a Further Maths student chooses between statistics, mechanics, discrete mathematics and additional pure. An A-Level Maths student chooses nothing. Treating Further Maths as "Maths but harder" gets the relationship backwards: the two qualifications differ first in how much of the content is fixed, and only then in what that content is.

The consequence is a timetabling one, and it is where marks quietly leak. Statistics and mechanics are often taught by different members of a department, in parallel with pure, and sometimes at lower intensity than the pure strand. A student who has fallen behind in mechanics rarely announces it, and strong pure work in the same paper masks the gap until a mock exam prices it. On the boards where an applied strand shares a paper with pure — AQA, OCR A and MEI — that masking effect is structural, not accidental.

What is the large data set, and is it available in the exam?

Every A-Level Maths specification has to tie its statistics teaching to real data. The DfE requires specifications to make students "become familiar with one or more specific large data set(s) in advance of the final assessment", and stipulates that the data "must be real and sufficiently rich" to support the data-presentation content. AQA adds the sentence that matters for planning: "This requirement is common to all exam boards." Each board then picks its own data set, publishes it, and writes questions around it.

The practical question is whether a student gets the data in front of them on the day, and the answer is no. OCR states it flatly: "Learners will NOT have a printout of the pre-release data set available to them in the examination but selected data or summary statistics from the data set may be provided within the examination paper." Pearson takes the same line — "Students will not be required to have copies of the data set in the examination, nor will they be required to have detailed knowledge of the actual data within the data set."

What is being examined is familiarity with the context, not recall of rows. Pearson designs these questions so that they "should be likely to give a material advantage to students who have studied and are familiar with the data set", and OCR sets its equivalent questions in Component 02. In practice that means knowing what the variables are, what units they use, what a plausible value looks like, and which sampling questions the data naturally invites — the sort of judgement that only comes from having opened the spreadsheet.

Because each board chooses its own, this is the one part of statistics revision that does not travel. AQA notes that "the specific extract that students need to be familiar with for the exam is only available via the AQA website". A student who changes school in Year 13 and lands on a different board starts the large data set again from nothing, and finding out which one they are now on is a first-week job, not a summer-term one.

Which calculator is allowed at A-Level Maths, and which is banned?

The DfE sets a floor. Calculators used must include "an iterative function" and "the ability to compute summary statistics and access probabilities from standard statistical distributions". OCR restates that requirement more concretely as "an iterative function such as an ANS key" and the ability to access probabilities from the binomial and normal distributions. AQA goes one step further than the national minimum and requires "an inverse normal function" as well — a genuine board difference, and one that a student arriving from another school can easily miss.

That floor rules out a good many calculators carried up from GCSE. A machine that cannot return a binomial or normal probability directly costs a candidate minutes on every statistics question, and on a two-hour paper those minutes are marks.

The ceiling catches the opposite mistake — buying the most powerful calculator available. Pearson's rules state that a calculator must not be "designed or adapted to offer" symbolic algebra manipulation or symbolic differentiation or integration. A computer algebra system is banned however capable it is. So are language translators, communication with other machines or the internet, and retrievable stored information including "mathematical formulas". A CAS calculator bought for A-Level Maths is a calculator that cannot go into the exam.

OCR adds a marking point no hardware solves. "Candidates are advised to write down explicitly any expressions, including integrals, that they use the calculator to evaluate", and "correct mathematical notation (rather than 'calculator notation') should be used; incorrect notation may result in loss of marks". Method marks are awarded for what is on the page, not for what happened on the screen.

Which formulae have to be memorised, and which are given?

Both, and the dividing line is published rather than guessed at. The DfE's Appendix B lists the formulae and identities that students "must be able to use ... without these formulae and identities being provided, either in these forms or in equivalent forms" — the quadratic formula, the laws of indices, the laws of logarithms, the equation of a straight line through a given point, the perpendicular-gradient condition, and the remainder of that appendix. The document allows one narrow exception: those formulae "may only be provided where they are the starting point for a proof or as a result to be proved".

Everything outside Appendix B arrives with the paper. Pearson states that "the booklet Mathematical Formulae and Statistical Tables will be provided for use in the assessments", and each board publishes its own equivalent booklet on the specification page linked at the end of this guide — worth downloading, because the contents are not identical between boards.

Two opposite errors follow, and we see both. Students who revise by memorising the booklet spend weeks on material they will be handed. Students who assume the booklet contains everything walk in without the Appendix B list they are expected to recall cold, and lose marks on questions that were never testing memory in the first place. Printing the board's formulae booklet next to Appendix B and marking which is which takes one session in early Year 13 and changes what a student memorises for the rest of the course.

Is an A* in A-Level Maths harder than in other subjects?

On the published outcomes, no. Top grades are markedly more common in Mathematics than across A levels as a whole, and the reason is who takes it rather than how it is marked.

JCQ's 2026 press notice says outright that "Maths remains the most popular A level subject", and the subject table puts the scale of that: 115,380 of 906,425 entries across every subject, better than one entry in eight. Entries rose from 111,033 in 2025, an increase of 3.9%, against a 3.9% rise in the 18-year-old population — so Mathematics held its share of a growing cohort rather than gaining ground on it.

Close to one A-Level Maths result in five is an A*, against fewer than one in ten across all subjects. That is not a soft boundary. Mathematics is chosen overwhelmingly by students who did well at GCSE, and the A* is deliberately engineered to separate them: OCR writes that its stretch and challenge questions "will support the awarding of A* grade at A Level, addressing the need for greater differentiation between the most able learners". The reading for a student targeting A* is that the routine 50% of marks is assumed, and the grade turns on the AO2 and AO3 questions that ask for reasoning and modelling. Students working up from a grade 6 or 7 at GCSE face the mirror image of that problem, and our GCSE Maths guide covers the groundwork that makes the transition survivable.

For contrast, A-Level Further Mathematics — a different qualification, taken by a much smaller and more self-selected group — recorded 21,032 UK entries in 2026 with 29.0% at A*.

Is A-Level Maths on its own enough for a maths degree?

For most quantitative degrees, yes. For Mathematics at Cambridge, no. Two things changed for 2027 entry and both are widely got wrong.

Oxford has retired the Mathematics Admissions Test. The Mathematical Institute states that from 2026 Oxford will use the TMUA, that the MAT will not take place, and that all applicants for Mathematics or Computer Science, including joint honours courses, will take the TMUA instead. Anyone still being told to prepare for the MAT for a 2027-entry application is working from guidance that has expired; our MAT page records the transition, and TMUA preparation covers what replaces it.

The second point is the reassuring one. The TMUA is reachable from A-Level Maths alone: its content specification places Part 1 within the pure mathematics of an AS level and Part 2 within Higher tier GCSE, so a student without Further Maths is not shut out of Oxford or Cambridge Mathematics on test grounds. Cambridge is the harder case. Its typical Mathematics offer is A*A*A, it names both Mathematics and Further Mathematics (A level only) as required subjects, and "all Colleges usually require at least grade 1 in two STEP papers (STEP 2 and 3)" — papers built directly on Further Maths pure content. That mapping is set out in full on our A-Level Further Maths page and there is no sense repeating it here.

Getting board-specific help with A-Level Maths

Because the content is fixed nationally, the first useful question in tuition is not what to teach but where a student's marks are exposed. Someone on Edexcel 9MA0 with weak mechanics has a bounded problem inside one section of one paper. The same student on MEI H640 has mechanics inside a paper worth 36.4% with no pure-only paper to fall back on. The revision plan follows from the specification, not from a generic scheme of work.

Our tutors work from the student's own board's past papers and mark schemes, and from the large data set that board actually publishes rather than a generic statistics course. Calculators get checked early, because a machine that cannot return binomial and normal probabilities — or, on AQA, an inverse normal — is a slow and entirely avoidable handicap. Where a student is applying for a mathematical degree we run TMUA reasoning practice against the October sitting. Where they are taking A-Level Physics alongside, kinematics and forces are taught once rather than twice. Rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot. The wider A-Level tuition hub lists the other subjects we cover, and if what you want is simply a tutor rather than a specification guide, our Maths tutor page explains how matching works.

Specifications and rules change. Every figure on this page comes from the awarding body's own specification, the Department for Education's subject content document or JCQ, and the primary documents are linked here: AQA 7357, Edexcel 9MA0, OCR A H240, MEI H640, WJEC and the DfE content document. Check them against your school's entry codes before planning a year of revision around them.

Frequently asked questions about A-Level Maths