A-Level Further Maths Tutors in Cambridge 2026

A-level Further Maths in Cambridge is a separate A-level, sat alongside A-level Maths, that fifteen of the city's seventeen post-16 providers entered candidates for in 2024/25. Hills Road Sixth Form College teaches the AQA specification; Long Road Sixth Form College, 0.66 miles away, teaches Pearson Edexcel; Cambridge Maths School teaches OCR B (MEI). The GCSE maths grade each asks for runs from 7 to 8, and one college teaches the subject only in twilight sessions.

That variation is the whole practical problem. Further Maths is small enough at most Cambridge sixth forms that a student sits it with a handful of others, on a specification their friends at the college down the road are not sitting, with optional papers their own department chose for them. Knowing which combination a student is actually entered for is where useful support starts.

Which Awarding Body Your Cambridge Sixth Form Uses, and Why Hills Road and Long Road Differ Half a Mile Apart

Cambridge City Council has no education function, so every local-authority figure the Department for Education publishes for a Cambridge institution is a Cambridgeshire figure, blending the city with Ely, Huntingdon, March, St Ives, St Neots and Wisbech. Building a city-level picture therefore means defining the city yourself. The rule used on this page is a postcode rule: a provider counts as Cambridge if its Get Information About Schools record gives a postcode in CB1, CB2, CB3 or CB4. Names are never used to decide. A name test would miss Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology under an abbreviation, and would wrongly pull in Comberton Village College at CB23 7DU and Impington Village College at CB24 9LX, both of which sit outside those four districts.

Thirty-five Cambridgeshire institutions appear in the Department for Education's 2024/25 institution-level subject dataset. Nineteen of them have a CB1 to CB4 postcode. Two of those nineteen, Gretton School and Sancton Wood School, have no 16-to-18 performance page at all. That leaves seventeen Cambridge providers that entered at least one GCE A level candidate in 2024/25, and fifteen that entered candidates for A-level Further Mathematics.

The two largest of those fifteen are half a mile apart and do not teach the same qualification. Hills Road Sixth Form College, at CB2 8PE, states its awarding body as AQA on its own course page. Long Road Sixth Form College, at CB2 8PX, states Edexcel on its own. Taking the two postcode centroids and a haversine calculation, the colleges are 0.66 miles apart in a straight line.

The papers diverge with the board. Hills Road tells applicants they will study Discrete Maths “as well as the option of Further Mechanics or Further Statistics” — so its students take Discrete and then choose one of the other two. Long Road publishes its module list instead: Core Pure Mathematics in the first year alongside Further Statistics 1 and Further Mechanics 1, then Core Pure Mathematics 1 and 2 with those same two applied modules in the second. A Long Road student takes both applied options; a Hills Road student takes Discrete and one. What each of those choices means in practice is set out on our A-level Further Maths papers and options guide, with the board-specific detail on the AQA Further Maths page and the Edexcel Further Maths page.

The entry bar diverges too, by a full GCSE grade and by a science requirement. Hills Road asks for “GCSE grade 8 in Mathematics and grade 8 in all Sciences”, and adds that applicants must have studied a minimum of two Sciences. Long Road asks for five GCSEs at grade 5 including grade 7 in GCSE Maths, grade 6 in two GCSE Sciences or Double Science, and grade 4 in GCSE English Language or Literature. A student holding grade 7 in maths and grade 6 in two sciences meets Long Road's published bar and does not meet Hills Road's.

Both colleges treat the subject the same way in one respect: it cannot be taken alone. Hills Road states that A level Further Maths “can only be studied by students who are also studying A level Maths”, and Long Road that it “can only be studied as a 4th subject alongside Maths A Level”. Long Road also says it teaches Further Maths in two dedicated groups across the two years.

The size difference is large. In 2024/25 Hills Road made 124 A-level Further Mathematics entries and Long Road 10 — 12.4 times as many, from two colleges 0.66 miles apart. Hills Road also made 10 AS-level Further Mathematics entries in the same year. One detail is worth knowing if you go to check any of this: Hills Road's 2024/25 data sits under URN 130615, which Get Information About Schools marks closed on 31 August 2025 because the college converted to an academy, with successor URN 152061 opening the next day under Hills Education Trust Limited. The college is open; the record split. Long Road went through the same conversion a year earlier, on 1 September 2024, which is why its 2024/25 results already sit under its newer URN 151132.

Where Further Maths Is the Whole Course and Not a Fourth Subject

Cambridge Maths School sits at 119 Mill Road, CB1 2AZ, 0.80 miles from Hills Road and 1.46 miles from Long Road. It opened on 1 September 2023 as a 16-to-19 free school under the Eastern Learning Alliance, and it uses neither of the boards its two larger neighbours use. Its curriculum page states that “all students study the OCR MEI Specification B syllabus”, which it says covers the statutory requirements of Pure Maths, Statistics and Mechanics and includes the minor Further Maths options of Extra Pure, Mechanics and Statistics. The differences between OCR's two Further Maths specifications are set out on our OCR Further Maths page.

Three awarding bodies, then, across three providers whose furthest separation is 1.46 miles. That is the practical case for asking a Cambridge sixth form which specification it enters before assuming anything about the papers a student will sit.

The school's timetabling is the sharper difference. Where Hills Road and Long Road describe Further Maths as a fourth A level, and Chesterton Sixth Form asks prospective students “would you like the chance to do a fourth A level?”, Cambridge Maths School teaches the specification to its whole intake. It made 42 A-level Further Mathematics entries in 2024/25. Beyond the taught syllabus it runs the Algorithms option “as an extra lecture series in Year 12”, which students may sit as part of their final examination in Year 13, and it places the remaining optional elements of the qualification in a Year 13 Accelerate programme built around the entrance-test criteria for STEP, MAT, ESAT and TMUA. Two of those sit outside the A-level entirely and have their own preparation: our STEP preparation page and TMUA preparation page cover what each paper asks for.

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How Cambridge's Smaller Further Maths Departments Run It

Below the three largest providers, Cambridge's Further Maths departments are small enough that the delivery model changes from one to the next. The table below sorts them by the number of A-level Further Mathematics entries each made in 2024/25, largest first; it is deliberately not sorted by any measure of performance.

The most distinctive arrangement in that table belongs to the smallest department. Oakes College Cambridge, which its own site describes as “formerly known as Netherhall Sixth Form Centre” and which is the sixth form of The Netherhall School under Anglian Learning, teaches Further Maths “as a twilight session” that is “an addition to the three A-Levels you opt to enrol in”. Lessons run twice a week, and the college says the course relies on independent study time between them. Its entry requirement is seven higher grades including grade 7 for Maths, grade 4 or above for English and grade 4 or above for other GCSE subjects. The Netherhall School's 2024/25 return shows 2 A-level Further Mathematics entries and 4 at AS level. Checked against every other CB1-CB4 provider's own entry, only one other shows the same reversed pattern: Cardiff Sixth Form College, Cambridge, whose 2024/25 return shows 22 A-level Further Mathematics entries against 29 at AS level. The other thirteen Cambridge providers with a Further Mathematics entry all enter more students at A-level than at AS level in the subject.

St Mary's School publishes more specification detail than any other provider in the city. Its course page names the syllabus outright — Edexcel AS Level 8MA0, A Level 9MA0 and Further Mathematics A Level 9FM0 — and sets out the option choice as “two of the following: Further Pure Mathematics 1, Further Statistics 1, Further Mechanics 1, Decision Mathematics 1”. Its entry requirement is grade 7 or above in GCSE Mathematics, rising to 8 or above for Further Mathematics, and it describes small class sizes. It made 6 A-level Further Mathematics entries in 2024/25.

The Perse School describes the workload rather than the modules. Its maths page explains that single-maths students sit two two-hour pure examinations and one two-hour mechanics and statistics paper, while “further mathematicians sit these 3 papers and in addition take two 1.5 hour further pure papers, a further mechanics paper and a further statistics paper”. The examining board, it says, is Edexcel. Abbey College Cambridge takes a different approach again and publishes a plain subject-by-subject table of its awarding bodies, which gives Further Mathematics as Edexcel.

Two Cambridge providers with a live Further Maths course name no awarding body at all. Chesterton Sixth Form's Further Mathematics page sets a clear entry requirement, grade 8 in GCSE Mathematics plus “a strong GCSE profile”, and says there is “the potential for students to study some Decision Mathematics centred around network theory” — but the page contains no mention of AQA, Edexcel, Pearson, OCR, MEI, WJEC or Eduqas anywhere in its text. Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology lists Further Maths among the nine A levels it offers and publishes a minimum entry requirement of seven GCSEs at grades 4 to 9, including Maths at 5 and English Language at 4, with at least a grade 6 in the subjects chosen at A level; its sixth form curriculum page names no awarding body either. In both cases the honest position is that the board is not stated on the page a prospective student would read, not that the department has not chosen one. A phone call to the department settles it in a minute.

What Cambridge's 2024/25 Further Maths Value Added Does and Does Not Show

Further Maths is a small enough subject that the Department for Education's value-added measure struggles to say anything about it. This is DfE's value-added progress measure for 2024/25 entrants, not a measure of teaching quality, and every figure below should be read with that in mind. Of the seventeen Cambridge providers, 14 have a 2024/25 Further Maths value-added row at all. Of those, 8 carry a published figure and 6 are suppressed, which means the department published no value. And of the 8 published figures, only 2 have a confidence interval that lies entirely on one side of zero.

Read that table as six rows of silence and two findings. Where an interval spans zero, the figure is not a weak result; it is an absence of a result, and on cohorts of 7, 9, 10 and 11 students that is exactly what small numbers produce. Across all 27 Cambridgeshire providers with a Further Maths row, the median published cohort is 11 students, and only 3 of the 27 intervals clear zero in either direction. The one negative among those three, Comberton Village College at -1.02 with an interval of -1.56 to -0.49 on 18 matched entries, sits at CB23 7DU and so falls outside the CB1 to CB4 rule this page uses.

The two Cambridge figures that do clear zero are Hills Road Sixth Form College at +0.27, interval 0.06 to 0.48 on 119 matched entries, and Cambridge Maths School at +0.45, interval 0.07 to 0.83 on 36 matched entries. Both intervals overlap each other, so the two cannot be ranked against one another on this measure, and neither figure says anything about the six providers whose rows are suppressed or the one with no row at all.

Two counting points matter if you check these numbers yourself. The value-added entry count and the exam-entry count are different measures: Hills Road shows 119 matched entries against 124 exam entries, and Abbey College Cambridge shows 7 matched entries against 43 exam entries. The department matches only students for whom it holds prior attainment, so the two columns are not interchangeable and this page labels which is which every time. Separately, Cambridge Arts and Sciences made 10 A-level Further Mathematics entries in 2024/25 and has no Further Maths value-added row at all, suppressed or otherwise — a reminder that an institution missing from a value-added table has not necessarily stopped teaching the subject.

What a Cambridge Student Can Do If Their Sixth Form Does Not Teach Further Maths

Two of the seventeen Cambridge providers entered nobody for A-level Further Mathematics in 2024/25. Cambridge Regional College, the city's further education college at CB4 2QT, made a single GCE A level Mathematics entry and has no Mathematics (Further) row at any level in its subjects-entered table. Parkside Community College at CB1 1EH made five GCE A level entries in total — one each in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Modern Greek and Russian — alongside a much larger International Baccalaureate Diploma programme, and likewise entered no Further Mathematics candidates.

For a student at a state-funded provider in that position there is a national route with a named operator. The Advanced Mathematics Support Programme states that it “can provide support for students in state-funded schools and colleges who would benefit from studying AS/A level Further Mathematics in cases where it can't be offered in your school/college”, delivered through its Further Mathematics Online Programme, which it describes as self-teaching resources plus weekly tutorials. The programme is not large: the AMSP says it enables 150 students to study A-level Further Mathematics each year that way, nationally. Cambridge alone had 15 providers entering candidates in 2024/25, so a place on it is worth asking about early rather than late.

The other route is the one the fifteen providers above already use, which is to take the qualification where it is taught. Cambridge Maths School, Hills Road and Long Road all publish their entry requirements openly, and a student whose current school does not run the course can apply to a sixth form that does. Our Cambridge A-level maths page sets out the wider provider comparison, and the Further Maths tutor page covers what the qualification asks of a student generally.

Frequently Asked Questions About A-Level Further Maths in Cambridge