All sixteen Cambridge sixth forms and colleges that entered A-level Biology candidates in 2024/25, ranked and compared on the Department for Education's own entry, requirement and exam-board data, provider by provider.
Book a Free ConsultationCambridge's sixteen sixth forms and colleges entered A-level Biology candidates in 2024/25, making 715 entries between them — a citywide figure the Department for Education does not publish directly. One institution, Hills Road Sixth Form College, made 390 of them, teaching OCR's Biology A specification (H420).
Our expert A-level Biology tutors help students across Cambridge with content across OCR, AQA and Pearson Edexcel specifications, including the practical endorsement activities that run alongside the graded papers, built around a student's own current working grade.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppCambridge City Council has no role in education. The local authority is Cambridgeshire County Council, and every "local authority" figure the Department for Education publishes for a Cambridge school is county-wide, blending the city with Ely, Huntingdon, March, St Ives, St Neots and Wisbech. No DfE table anywhere states a Cambridge-city figure for A-level Biology on its own, which is the gap this page fills.
This page's institution set is post-16 only, and it is genuinely different from the eight state secondaries a GCSE-stage Cambridge Biology page would cover: at 16-18, provision sits mainly in large sixth-form colleges rather than school sixth forms. Sixteen Cambridge institutions — confirmed against the postcode on each one's own Get Information About Schools record, all CB1 to CB4 — entered A-level candidates of any subject in 2024/25: two large state sixth-form colleges, three secondary academies with their own sixth form, one further education college, one specialist state free school, and nine independent schools and colleges. Excluded deliberately: Cambridge Muslim Secondary School, which sits inside the same radius but is an 11-16 school with no sixth form; Coleridge Community College, Parkside Community College, Trumpington Community College and North Cambridge Academy, all 11-16 institutions; several independent prep schools (King's College School, St John's College School, St Faith's School) that do not teach A-levels; and Impington Village College and Comberton Village College, both well known to Cambridge families but sitting in South Cambridgeshire district, outside the city boundary. Fourteen of the sixteen made at least one A-level Biology entry in 2024/25; only Cambridge Regional College and Cambridge Maths School are covered below despite very small Biology cohorts, because DfE still publishes their entry counts even at n=1 and n=2.
Summed across all sixteen providers — a total DfE does not publish at city level — Cambridge made 715 A-level Biology entries in 2024/25. Hills Road Sixth Form College and Long Road Sixth Form College, the city's two large sixth-form colleges, together account for 484 of them, 67.7% of the citywide total, before any of the other fourteen providers are counted.
| Sixth form / college | Type | A-level Biology entries | AS Biology entries | Share of city total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hills Road Sixth Form College | Academy (sixth-form college) | 390 | 1 | 54.5% |
| Long Road Sixth Form College | Academy (sixth-form college) | 94 | None recorded | 13.1% |
| The Perse School | Independent | 55 | None recorded | 7.7% |
| Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology | Academy | 31 | None recorded | 4.3% |
| The Stephen Perse Foundation | Independent | 33 | None recorded | 4.6% |
| St Mary's School | Independent | 18 | None recorded | 2.5% |
| Abbey College Cambridge | Independent (sixth-form college) | 17 | 1 | 2.4% |
| The Leys School | Independent | 14 | None recorded | 2.0% |
| Cardiff Sixth Form College, Cambridge | Independent (sixth-form college) | 13 | 16 | 1.8% |
| Mander Portman Woodward | Independent (sixth-form college) | 13 | None recorded | 1.8% |
| The Netherhall School | Academy | 13 | None recorded | 1.8% |
| St. Andrew's College Cambridge | Independent (sixth-form college) | 9 | None recorded | 1.3% |
| Chesterton Community College | Academy | 6 | None recorded | 0.8% |
| Cambridge Arts and Sciences (CATS and CSVPA) | Independent (sixth-form college) | 6 | 1 | 0.8% |
| Cambridge Maths School | Free school | 2 | None recorded | 0.3% |
| Cambridge Regional College | FE college | 1 | None recorded | 0.1% |
Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, subjects entered, read for each of the sixteen providers, 16-to-18 results for 2024/25, read on 2 September 2026. "None recorded" means the provider's own subjects-entered table carries no row for that qualification. Entries are exam entries, not students: a student who also sits Chemistry or Physics appears again in those subjects' own rows, and DfE's subjects-entered table does not report a separate "Biology students" headcount. Cardiff Sixth Form College, Cambridge made more AS Biology entries (16) than A-level entries (13), consistent with a college built substantially around one-year and resit programmes.
Hills Road's 390 A-level Biology entries are more than four times Long Road's 94, and more than seven times The Perse School's 55, the next-largest independent provider. Hills Road alone accounts for 54.5% of every A-level Biology entry made in Cambridge in 2024/25, from one institution out of sixteen — a sharper concentration than this page's sibling found for A-level Mathematics, where the same college's share of the city's Mathematics entries was 49.7%. Cambridge Maths School, the specialist free school that dominates this city's A-level Mathematics page, makes only 2 Biology entries a year — a reminder that a provider's strength in one science says nothing about another.
Our expert A-level Biology tutors help students across Cambridge, from the 390 entries at Hills Road Sixth Form College to the single entry at Cambridge Regional College. They teach to the specification a student's own sixth form actually enters, not to a generic scheme of work.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppEntry requirements for A-level Biology are set by each institution individually, not by DfE or by the exam boards, and they vary more sharply than a single "typical grade 6" answer suggests. Three of Cambridge's providers publish theirs in enough detail to compare directly.
| Sixth form / college | Own stated minimum requirement for A-level Biology |
|---|---|
| Hills Road Sixth Form College | GCSE grade 7 in Biology, grade 6 in Chemistry and grade 6 in Mathematics; or grade 7 in both Combined Sciences and grade 6 in Mathematics. Higher Admissions Score of 71 for Biology (69 for Cambridgeshire Area Partnership schools). |
| Long Road Sixth Form College | Five GCSEs at grade 5, including grade 6 in Mathematics, grade 6 in Biology and another Science at grade 6 (or grade 6,6 in Double Science), and grade 4 in English Language or Literature. |
| Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology | Seven GCSEs at grade 4-9, including grade 6 in Mathematics, grade 4 in English Language and grade 6 in Biology. |
Source: each institution's own admissions or course page — Hills Road Sixth Form College (A-level Biology course page), Long Road Sixth Form College (Biology A-level page) and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology (Sixth Form Biology curriculum page), all read on 2 September 2026. The other thirteen Cambridge providers do not publish a Biology-specific GCSE grade requirement on a page this research could locate; where that is the case, this page does not generalise a figure for them.
Hills Road, the provider making more than half the city's A-level Biology entries, sets the highest bar of the three: a full grade 7 in GCSE Biology itself, not just in a combined science, plus grade 6 in both Chemistry and Mathematics. Long Road and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology both accept a grade 6 in Biology, one grade lower, though Long Road additionally names a second science subject at grade 6 that Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology's own page does not require. A student comparing offers between Cambridge's two largest sixth-form colleges is not comparing like with like on paper, even before results are considered.
A-level Biology, along with Chemistry and Physics, carries a practical skills endorsement that is assessed and reported separately from the graded A*-E result. The Joint Council for Qualifications' own rules for reformed linear GCE specifications in England state that results documentation to centres includes the subject grade and, for the A-level sciences, a separate endorsement grade of Pass or Not Classified, with no marks attached to it. A certificate carries the endorsement result only if the student also achieved a graded A*-E result for the A-level itself; a strong practical record does not lift a weak exam grade, and a weak practical record does not pull a strong exam grade down.
Each awarding body sets its own practical activities within that shared rule, evidence for which is gathered by teachers across the two-year course rather than in a single end-of-course exam, which is why a Cambridge sixth form's own scheme of work, not just its choice of exam board, affects how comfortably a student clears the endorsement alongside the written papers.
Our expert A-level Biology tutors help students meet their sixth form's own entry requirements and then build on them, whether that is the grade 7 Hills Road asks for or the grade 6 accepted elsewhere, and cover the practical skills the endorsement examines alongside the three written papers.
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Four A-level Biology specifications are currently available to English sixth forms, each confirmed on its own awarding body's site and, for the two Pearson Edexcel routes, inside the specification PDF itself rather than the marketing page. All four were approved for first teaching from September 2015, a year ahead of the Mathematics reform this page's sibling covers, with first certification from 2017.
| Awarding body | Specification | A-level code | AS code |
|---|---|---|---|
| AQA | Biology | 7402 | 7401 |
| OCR | Biology A | H420 | H020 |
| OCR | Biology B (Advancing Biology) | H422 | H022 |
| Pearson Edexcel | Biology A (Salters-Nuffield) | 9BN0 | Not separately confirmed |
| Pearson Edexcel | Biology B | 9BI0 | Not separately confirmed |
Source: AQA's own Biology 7402 specification page; OCR's Biology A (H020/H420) and Biology B (H022/H422) qualification pages; Pearson Edexcel's Biology A (Salters-Nuffield) and Biology B specification PDFs, both confirming "First teaching from September 2015, first certification from 2017" on their cover pages. All read on 2 September 2026. AQA's AS code (7401) is quoted from the same specification page as its A-level code; the two Pearson Edexcel AS codes were not independently confirmed in a source this research could quote and are not published here.
Two of Cambridge's providers confirm their choice on their own course pages. Hills Road Sixth Form College, the city's largest Biology provider, teaches OCR's Biology A (H420). Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology, a much smaller state school sharing the Cherry Hinton Hall site with Cambridge Maths School, teaches the identical OCR Biology A specification. Long Road Sixth Form College's own course page names Pearson Edexcel as its awarding body without stating which of the two Edexcel routes, Biology A (Salters-Nuffield) or Biology B, it enters students for; this page does not guess between them. The remaining thirteen Cambridge providers do not publish their Biology exam board on a page this research could locate. Our own tutors teach to whichever specification a student is actually sitting — OCR Biology A, OCR Biology B, AQA or either Pearson Edexcel route — matching past-paper practice and practical endorsement preparation to that board specifically.
OCR is withdrawing its Biology B (Advancing Biology) specification (H422/H022). OCR's own qualification page states: “The final first teach date will be September 2026. The final assessment opportunity for AS Level will be June 2027. The final assessment opportunity for A Level will be June 2028.” A student starting Biology B for the first time after September 2026 would have no further intake to join; the final A-level assessment series is June 2028. This affects OCR's Biology B route only, not OCR Biology A (H420) — the specification Hills Road Sixth Form College and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology teach — whose own OCR qualification page carries no withdrawal notice at all. No Cambridge provider in this dataset is confirmed on Biology B specifically, so this does not currently name an affected institution, but it is worth checking directly with any sixth form or college still offering it.
The Department for Education publishes a progress score for each Cambridge institution, but it is calculated across every A-level subject a student takes there, not Biology on its own, and DfE does not publish a Biology-specific version of it for any Cambridge provider. Cardiff Sixth Form College, Cambridge posted the city's strongest institution-wide score in 2024/25, +1.28 (WELL ABOVE AVERAGE), from 53 students — but only 13 of those students' entries were in A-level Biology, with a further 16 at AS level. Cambridge Arts and Sciences (CATS and CSVPA) posted the weakest, -1.31 (WELL BELOW AVERAGE), from 42 students, of whom just 6 entered A-level Biology. Hills Road Sixth Form College, by contrast, posted a near-average +0.03 across its whole 1,412-student A-level cohort, a figure that says very little either way about the teaching behind its 390 Biology entries specifically.
At the smaller end of the table — Cambridge Regional College's single entry, Cambridge Maths School's two, St. Andrew's College Cambridge's nine, Chesterton Community College's and Cambridge Arts and Sciences' six each — an individual student's result would move a Biology-specific figure far more than it could move an institution's whole-cohort score, if DfE published one. A parent choosing Biology tuition on the strength of a sixth form's overall progress-score banding is reading real evidence about that institution, but not evidence about its Biology teaching in particular; the two can, and at Cardiff and Hills Road both do, point in different directions.
Families further along the same path will find broader subject coverage on our A-level tuition page and subject-specific teaching detail on our A-level Biology tuition page. Students earlier in their Cambridge schooling can compare GCSE-stage figures on our GCSE Biology tutors in Cambridge page, and families weighing up sixth-form entry itself, rather than results once there, on our 16+ tuition in Cambridge page. Our A-level Maths tutors in Cambridge page covers the same sixteen-provider dataset for Mathematics. Our broader Cambridge tutoring hub covers every subject and stage we teach in the city.
Our expert A-level Biology tutors help students across Cambridge, whether a student is at Hills Road working through 390 classmates' worth of shared teaching resources or one of a handful of Biology candidates at a smaller college. Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews, read on 22 August 2026.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppEvery entry count on this page counts exam entries, not students: a student who takes Biology, Chemistry and Maths together appears once in each subject's own row, and DfE's subjects-entered tables do not separately publish how many individual students that represents. The Cambridgeshire and England comparator figures cited elsewhere on this site for whole-cohort measures are county-wide and national respectively; DfE does not publish a Cambridge-city aggregate for Biology entries, progress scores or any other 16-18 measure, which is why every citywide total on this page is this page's own sum of sixteen individually sourced rows rather than a single DfE-published number.
Where an entry requirement or exam board is not listed for a provider above, that is a genuine gap in what that institution publishes on its own website, not a zero: several Cambridge sixth forms describe their Biology course in general terms without stating a specific GCSE grade or naming Pearson, AQA or OCR by board. A parent comparing sixth forms on this page's figures alone is comparing what each institution has chosen to publish, not necessarily what each institution actually requires or teaches.
Hills Road Sixth Form College made 390 A-level Biology entries in 2024/25, out of 715 made across Cambridge's sixteen providers combined — 54.5% of every A-level Biology entry made in the city that year, from a single institution teaching OCR's Biology A specification (H420). Long Road Sixth Form College, the city's other large sixth-form college, made 94.
715, summed across all sixteen Cambridge providers from their own individual subjects-entered tables — a figure the Department for Education does not publish at city level. Hills Road Sixth Form College and Long Road Sixth Form College, the city's two large sixth-form colleges, together made 484 of them, 67.7% of the citywide total, leaving the other fourteen providers to share the remaining third.
Hills Road's own admissions page sets two routes: GCSE grade 7 in Biology plus grade 6 in Chemistry and grade 6 in Mathematics, or grade 7 in both Combined Sciences plus grade 6 in Mathematics. It also carries a Higher Admissions Score of 71 for Biology, or 69 for schools in its Cambridgeshire Area Partnership. That is a full grade higher in Biology itself than Long Road Sixth Form College, which asks for grade 6 in GCSE Biology and grade 6 in Maths.
No. The Joint Council for Qualifications' own rules for reformed linear GCE sciences state that results documentation reports the A*-E subject grade separately from the practical skills endorsement, which carries no marks of its own and is reported only as Pass or Not Classified. The endorsement appears on a student's certificate only if they also achieved a graded A*-E result; it does not add to or subtract from that grade.
OCR's Biology A specification, code H420, according to Hills Road's own course page. Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology, a smaller state school on the same Cherry Hinton Hall site, teaches the same OCR Biology A specification. Long Road Sixth Form College uses Pearson Edexcel, though its own course page does not state whether that is the Biology A (Salters-Nuffield, 9BN0) or Biology B (9BI0) route.
The whole county. Cambridge sits inside Cambridgeshire, a two-tier area where Cambridgeshire County Council is the local education authority and Cambridge City Council has no role in schools. Every "local authority" column on the Department for Education's Compare School and College Performance service is labelled "Cambridgeshire", blending the city with Ely, Huntingdon, St Neots and Wisbech. There is no DfE comparator for Cambridge the city on its own; this page builds one from the city's own sixteen named providers instead.
No. Hills Road Sixth Form College teaches OCR's Biology A (H420); Long Road Sixth Form College teaches Pearson Edexcel. Between them the two colleges made 484 of the city's 715 A-level Biology entries in 2024/25, so a student moving between Cambridge's two largest sixth forms, or comparing past papers with a friend at the other one, is working from a genuinely different specification, not just a different teacher.
Not on its own. The progress score the Department for Education publishes for each Cambridge provider covers every A-level subject a student takes there, not Biology alone, and at several providers the entire Biology cohort is small enough that one or two students would move a subject-specific figure considerably if DfE published one. Cardiff Sixth Form College's institution-wide score of +1.28 sits across all its subjects from 53 students, only 13 of them in A-level Biology; the figure is genuine evidence about the college, but it is not a Biology result.
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