The exam board, optional papers, GCSE grade requirement and DfE’s 2024/25 value-added data for every Bristol sixth form and college that enters A-level Further Maths.
Book a Free ConsultationA-level Further Maths in Bristol is not one course but several: seventeen of the city's nineteen currently open sixth forms and colleges returned a 2024/25 entry for the subject to DfE, and the optional papers a department has chosen range from St Brendan's Sixth Form College's pure-mechanics-decision combination to Bristol Grammar School's OCR MEI Syllabus B with an Extra Pure minor unit. Entry counts run from 21 candidates down to 1.
Whichever Bristol sixth form or college your child attends, our expert A-level Further Maths tutors build every programme around the actual option set, exam board and papers that department has chosen, not a generic overview of “A-level Further Maths”.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppA-level Further Maths is built from a compulsory Core Pure component and a department's own choice of optional papers, and in a subject this small the choice is a fact about that department, not the exam board's national syllabus. Of Bristol's currently open sixth forms and colleges, several publish enough about their own course to say which options they have picked; others publish nothing that names a paper or a board at all.
St Brendan's Sixth Form College, the city's largest Further Maths group at 21 A-level entries in 2024/25, describes its course as pure mathematics combined with mechanics and decision mathematics, taken alongside A-level Mathematics as a fourth subject. Its own course page names no exam board.
Bristol Grammar School names OCR MEI Syllabus B as its awarding body and teaches Core Pure alongside Statistics and Mechanics, plus an Extra Pure minor unit covering groups, recurrence relations, matrices and multivariable calculus, assessed across three or four written papers depending on the exact combination a student takes. The school entered 20 A-level and 1 AS candidate in 2024/25, and separately runs an AS-only Further Mathematics course in the Upper Sixth, covering roughly half of the full A-level's additional content, for students who want the qualification without the second year's extra papers.
North Bristol Post 16 Centre states OCR as its Further Maths awarding body, across four 90-minute, 75-mark papers: two in pure mathematics, one in mechanics and one in statistics, assessed entirely by examination. It does not say on its own course page which of OCR's two Further Maths specifications — the standard route or MEI — it enters.
Bristol Free School's own curriculum pages name three papers — Core Pure 2, Further Mechanics 1 and Further Statistics 1 — each worth 25% of the A-level and assessed in a 90-minute exam, with Core Pure content taught across Year 12. Neither the school's Year 12 nor Year 13 curriculum page names an awarding body, so despite the paper names, no board is attributed here.
St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School entered 19 A-level and 3 AS Further Maths candidates in 2024/25, the city's third-largest group, but its own domain, smrt.bristol.sch.uk, returned no DNS record on 26 September 2026 — a control host on the same resolver, Redland Green School's, returned one on the same run — so nothing about its board or optional papers is published here.
The rules governing which optional papers a board allows to be combined belong to our national A-level Further Maths overview, which covers AQA, Edexcel, OCR and OCR MEI in full — not restated on this page.
Seventeen of Bristol's nineteen currently open sixth forms and colleges returned a 2024/25 entry for A-level Mathematics (Further); two did not. Ashton Park School has a sixth form and entered 2 A-level Mathematics candidates that year, but none in Further Maths. E-ACT Bristol Academy South, the Fresh Start successor to the closed Merchants' Academy, does not have a sixth form at all, according to GIAS.
Sixteen distinct institutions carry their own Further Maths entries; the table below sorts them by 2024/25 A-level entry count, largest first, exactly as DfE's own subjects-entered tables report each institution's data.
| Provider | A-level Further Maths entries | AS Further Maths entries |
|---|---|---|
| St Brendan's Sixth Form College | 21 | 2 |
| Bristol Grammar School | 20 | 1 |
| St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School | 19 | 3 |
| Bristol Free School | 15 | 0 |
| Queen Elizabeth's Hospital | 13 | 0 |
| Clifton College | 13 | 0 |
| St Bede's Catholic College | 13 | 6 |
| Redland Green School | 11 | 3 |
| Bristol Cathedral Choir School | 7 | 4 |
| Collegiate School | 7 | 0 |
| Redmaids' High School | 7 | 2 |
| Cotham School | 6 | 2 |
| Badminton School | 6 | 4 |
| E-ACT Montpelier High School | 6 | 0 |
| Clifton High School | 2 | 4 |
| City of Bristol College | 1 | 4 |
Across those sixteen departments the median 2024/25 entry count is 9, and the range runs from St Brendan's Sixth Form College's 21 down to City of Bristol College's 1. Eight of the sixteen entered 7 candidates or fewer, and twelve entered 13 or fewer — a Further Maths group the size of a large GCSE class exists in Bristol, but it is the exception rather than the rule. Our expert Bristol A-level Further Maths tutors work with students at departments of any size, from St Brendan's 21-strong cohort to a college running a single-figure class; book a free consultation to get started.
North Bristol Post 16 Centre is not a seventeenth Bristol Further Maths department: it is the shared sixth form of Cotham School and Redland Green School, and its published figures are exactly theirs added together. Its 17 A-level Further Maths entries are Redland Green's 11 plus Cotham's 6; its 5 AS entries are Redland Green's 3 plus Cotham's 2; its 17 value-added-matched entries are the same 11 plus 6 again; and its 118 A-level Mathematics entries are Redland Green's 79 plus Cotham's 39. GIAS's own Links table for the centre (URN 135589) records exactly two links, both typed ‘Sixth Form Centre School’: Cotham School from 10 August 2012 and Redland Green School from 21 February 2013. The centre is excluded from the sixteen-institution count above for exactly this reason.
The three Bristol providers that publish an entry requirement for Further Maths all converge on the same GCSE grade, even though they teach different option sets. St Brendan's Sixth Form College asks for GCSE Maths at grade 8 or above, plus five GCSEs at grade 4 or above including GCSE English Language, with Further Maths taken as a fourth subject alongside A-level Mathematics. North Bristol Post 16 Centre asks for GCSE grade 8 in mathematics and requires the student to also study A-level Mathematics. Bristol Grammar School sets a minimum of grade 8 or 9, against grade 7 for A-level Mathematics on its own.
That convergence matters because Further Maths is not offered as a substitute for A-level Mathematics anywhere in this data — it sits alongside it, as a fourth subject on top of the usual three. The Advanced Mathematics Support Programme, the national body that supports schools and colleges to offer the full range of advanced maths qualifications, states that it “strongly encourages” schools to enable Further Maths to be taken as a fourth A-level wherever a student can manage the extra workload.
Not every Bristol department runs a viable full A-level class every year, and the city's AS-level entries show where the smaller providers land. Bristol recorded 35 AS Further Maths entries in 2024/25 against 167 at A-level. City of Bristol College entered 4 candidates at AS against a single one at A-level; Clifton High School entered 4 at AS against 2 at A-level; St Bede's Catholic College entered 6 at AS alongside its 13 at A-level. Bristol Free School entered none at AS at all.
AS is not only a fallback for the smallest departments. Bristol Grammar School, the city's second-largest Further Maths group, runs its own AS-only Further Mathematics course in the Upper Sixth deliberately, covering roughly half of the full A-level's additional content for students who want the qualification without committing to the second year's extra papers.
Where a Bristol sixth form genuinely cannot run Further Maths in-house, the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme runs a dedicated route for exactly this gap. It names four standard options: teaching a small group on a reduced timetable, combining students from two or more schools or colleges to form one viable class, sharing teaching between the school and a local AMSP tutor, or arranging for the AMSP to provide the tuition directly — and it separately recommends offering the AS alone, for Year 13 students, where the full A-level will not run. The programme supports state-funded schools and colleges; its published guidance does not extend the same offer to the independent sector. Our expert A-level Further Maths tutors in Bristol support students on the AS route just as readily as the full A-level, whichever combination their sixth form has arranged; book a free consultation to discuss your child's own arrangement.
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DfE's value-added measure scores a department's exam results against what its students' prior attainment predicted, for the 2024/25 A-level cohort; it is not a measure of teaching quality, and a result whose own confidence interval spans zero says nothing at all. Of Bristol's 17 Further Maths value-added rows for 2024/25 — 14 published and 3 suppressed for small cohorts — only 3 have an interval that lies entirely above or entirely below zero.
Bristol Free School's score is +0.6, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.01 to 1.19 on 15 matched entries, an interval that lies entirely above zero. St Bede's Catholic College's score is -0.71, with a 95% confidence interval of -1.35 to -0.08 on 13 matched entries, an interval that lies entirely below zero. Both figures describe DfE's own progress measure for these two departments' 2024/25 cohorts and are not a ranking against any other Bristol provider.
E-ACT Montpelier High School's 2024/25 A-level Further Maths value-added score is -1.15, with a 95% confidence interval of -2.09 to -0.22 on 6 matched entries, an interval that lies entirely below zero. E-ACT Montpelier High School opened on 1 September 2024, as a Fresh Start academy replacing the predecessor Montpelier High School, which closed the day before. This page draws no link between the two facts: DfE's value-added measure records progress against prior attainment for the 2024/25 cohort, not teaching quality, and a six-student cohort is easily moved by a single result.
Three of Bristol's Further Maths rows are suppressed rather than published: Badminton School, which entered 6 A-level and 4 AS candidates in 2024/25; Clifton High School, which entered 2 and 4; and City of Bristol College, which entered 1 and 4. Suppression is DfE's own withholding rule for small cohorts, not a missing measurement. A published score can also cover fewer students than actually sat the exam: Clifton College entered 13 A-level Further Maths candidates in 2024/25 but only 8 were matched to prior attainment for its value-added row, the widest gap between the two counts in the city, so its published score of -0.22 (95% CI -1.03 to 0.59) describes 8 students' progress, not all 13 who sat the exam.
Whichever Bristol sixth form or college a student attends, our expert A-level Further Maths tutors build every programme around that department's own published option set and paper structure — St Brendan's pure-mechanics-decision combination, Bristol Grammar School's OCR MEI Syllabus B with its Extra Pure minor, or North Bristol Post 16 Centre's four-paper OCR route — rather than a generic Further Maths syllabus that assumes every Bristol student sits the same papers. A student who needs the qualification because their own sixth form cannot run it, following the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme's own combined-group and reduced-timetable routes, gets a programme built around whichever specification their arrangement actually uses. Book a free consultation and tell us your child's own sixth form, board and paper combination, and we will take it from there.
For the board-by-board rules on which optional papers may be combined, our national A-level Further Maths overview covers AQA, Edexcel, OCR and OCR MEI in full; for the wider service we offer across every subject, see our Further Maths tuition page, and for the rest of what we cover in the city, our tutoring in Bristol overview. Bristol's Further Maths entry figures sit alongside our A-level Maths page, where the same three largest providers already publish entry counts that match what is reported here.
Seventeen of Bristol's nineteen currently open sixth forms and colleges returned a 2024/25 entry for A-level Mathematics (Further) to DfE, from St Brendan's Sixth Form College's 21 candidates down to City of Bristol College's 1. Ashton Park School, which has a sixth form, entered none, and neither did E-ACT Bristol Academy South, which GIAS records as not having one. Three of the seventeen rows sit under one shared centre: North Bristol Post 16 Centre's 17 entries are Redland Green School's 11 plus Cotham School's 6, published under the centre's own URN rather than as three separate totals.
No. GIAS's own Links table for North Bristol Post 16 Centre (URN 135589) records exactly two links, both typed 'Sixth Form Centre School': Cotham School from 10 August 2012 and Redland Green School from 21 February 2013. The centre's 2024/25 Further Maths entries prove the same pooling from the results side: 17 A-level entries are Redland Green's 11 plus Cotham's 6, 5 AS entries are 3 plus 2, and 17 value-added-matched entries are 11 plus 6 again. Its 118 A-level Mathematics entries are likewise Redland Green's 79 plus Cotham's 39. It is never counted as a seventeenth institution.
The three Bristol providers that publish an entry requirement all ask for grade 8. St Brendan's Sixth Form College asks for GCSE Maths at grade 8 or above, alongside five GCSEs at grade 4 or above and GCSE English Language at grade 4, taken as a fourth subject. North Bristol Post 16 Centre asks for GCSE grade 8 in mathematics and requires the student to study A-level Mathematics alongside it. Bristol Grammar School sets a minimum of grade 8 or 9, against grade 7 for A-level Mathematics alone. The Advanced Mathematics Support Programme separately recommends offering Further Maths as a fourth A-level wherever a student can manage it.
Ashton Park School and City of Bristol College's near-absent single entry show how thin provision can get even where a sixth form exists. The Advanced Mathematics Support Programme runs a dedicated route for exactly this: it names teaching a small group on a reduced timetable, combining students from two or more schools or colleges into one viable class, sharing teaching with a local AMSP tutor, or having the AMSP provide the tuition directly, and it explicitly supports offering the AS alone where the full A-level will not run. Bristol Grammar School already runs its own AS Further Mathematics in the Upper Sixth, covering roughly half the full A-level's extra content, as one school's version of the same fallback.
It is not the same board across the city, and two of Bristol's larger departments do not name one at all. North Bristol Post 16 Centre states OCR as its awarding body, across four 90-minute, 75-mark papers covering two pure units, mechanics and statistics. Bristol Grammar School names OCR MEI Syllabus B, with Core Pure, Statistics, Mechanics and an Extra Pure minor unit across three or four written papers. St Brendan's Sixth Form College and Bristol Free School each publish detailed paper or topic lists but name no awarding body on their own course pages, and St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School, the city's third-largest department by entries, has no working website to check at all.
Very little, because the cohorts are small: only 3 of Bristol's 17 published and suppressed Further Maths rows have a confidence interval that clears zero in either direction, and the other 14 either span zero or are suppressed outright. Bristol Free School's score is above zero on 15 matched entries, and St Bede's Catholic College's is below zero on 13. E-ACT Montpelier High School's score is also below zero, on a cohort of 6. Value added is DfE's measure of progress against prior attainment for 2024/25 entrants; it is not a measure of teaching quality, and none of these figures ranks one Bristol department against another.
Smaller than most subjects taught at A-level. Across the city's 16 distinct Further Maths departments, the median 2024/25 entry count is 9 students, and 8 of the 16 entered 7 candidates or fewer. Twelve entered 13 or fewer. The range runs from St Brendan's Sixth Form College's 21 down to City of Bristol College's 1. A department that size is a different teaching proposition from a 30-strong GCSE class, which is one reason the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme exists specifically to help schools combine or share small Further Maths groups rather than run each one in isolation.
Tell us which Bristol sixth form or college your child attends and which option set or board it has published, and we will take it from there. See how we support the city's wider maths provision: Bristol A-level Maths and Bristol GCSE Maths.
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