A Level Maths Tutors in Cambridge: The DfE Sixth-Form Data

Cambridge sits inside Cambridgeshire, a two-tier county where the Department for Education's own comparator column covers Ely, Huntingdon and Wisbech alongside Cambridge, not the city alone. Sixteen Cambridge sixth forms and colleges entered A-level candidates in 2024/25. One of them, Hills Road Sixth Form College, made 733 A-level Mathematics entries — very close to half of every Mathematics entry made across the city that year.

How Many Sixth Forms Does Cambridge Actually Have, and Are They All "Cambridge"?

Cambridge 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 therefore county-wide: it blends Cambridge with Ely, Huntingdon, March, St Ives, St Neots and Wisbech, towns with very different sixth-form populations. No DfE table anywhere states a Cambridge-city figure on its own, which is the gap this page is built to fill.

Building that city-level picture meant checking each candidate institution's own address rather than trusting a name. Sixteen Cambridge sixth forms and colleges — confirmed against the postcode on each one's own Get Information About Schools record, all CB1 to CB4 — entered A-level candidates 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. Two well-known nearby institutions were deliberately left out: Impington Village College and Comberton Village College both sit in South Cambridgeshire district, outside the city boundary, even though many Cambridge families use them. Cambridgeshire's own state-funded total is 3,369 students with an A-level entry in 2024/25; Cambridge's seven state-funded providers alone — Hills Road, Long Road, Cambridge Maths School, Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology, Chesterton Community College, The Netherhall School and Cambridge Regional College — account for 2,378 of them, 70.6% of the county's state-funded A-level cohort. The sixteen providers combined, independent schools included, enrol 3,144 students with an A-level entry; the Department for Education publishes no all-types county total that figure could be measured against.

How Many Students Take A-Level Maths at Each Cambridge Sixth Form?

The Department for Education's subjects-entered table counts exam entries, not students, so a student sitting both Mathematics and Further Mathematics appears in both columns below. Summed across all sixteen providers — a total DfE does not publish at city level — Cambridge made 1,475 A-level Mathematics entries and 381 A-level Further Mathematics entries in 2024/25.

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 28 August 2026. "None recorded" means the provider's own subjects-entered table carries no row for that qualification. Some AS-level Mathematics and Further Mathematics entries also exist at several providers and are not shown in this table; the largest is Cardiff Sixth Form College, Cambridge, which made 48 AS Mathematics and 29 AS Further Mathematics entries alongside the A-level entries above, consistent with a small college that also runs shorter and resit programmes.

Hills Road Sixth Form College's 733 A-level Mathematics entries are not just the highest in Cambridge; they are close to half of the city's entire 1,475-entry total, from one institution out of sixteen. Its 124 Further Mathematics entries are also the most in the city, but there they account for a smaller share — 32.5% of the 381-entry citywide total — because The Perse School's 58 Further Mathematics entries and Abbey College Cambridge's 90 Mathematics and 43 Further Mathematics entries close some of the gap. Cambridge Regional College, a further education college whose main offer is vocational, made a single A-level Mathematics entry and none in Further Mathematics.

Cambridge's Sixteen Providers, Ranked on 2024/25 A-Level Results

Two columns in the table below are meant to be read together. Average points per entry is a raw attainment figure that credits whoever a provider admitted as much as what it then taught them. The progress score beside it is the Department for Education's own banded measure, running from WELL BELOW AVERAGE to WELL ABOVE AVERAGE, and it is the column where Cambridge's order changes most.

Neither the AAB column nor the retention column is reliably taken over the students column beside it, so the table names the base for each in the cell. At Long Road Sixth Form College those are two very different numbers: 706 students with an A-level entry, but only 331 counted in the AAB measure and 696 enrolled for retention.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, "Advanced level qualifications" pages for each of the sixteen providers plus the Cambridgeshire local authority overview, 16-to-18 results for 2024/25, read on 28 August 2026. Hills Road Sixth Form College's 2024/25 results are published under its predecessor URN (130615) ahead of a recent academy conversion; NA is DfE's own marker at every independent school, and NE is the marker Cambridge Regional College's retention row carries at its cohort size. "Not shown" means DfE's own all-schools comparator carries no value in that cell. DfE does not publish a single Cambridge-city aggregate: the 3,369-student Cambridgeshire row is the county's state-funded total, and Cambridge's seven state-funded providers above account for 2,378 of it — 70.6% of the county's state-funded A-level cohort sits inside the city. The sixteen providers' combined 3,144 students spans both state-funded and independent institutions, so it cannot be measured against this state-funded county row directly.

Hills Road Sixth Form College's row is put last among the named providers deliberately: with 1,412 students it is twice the size of the next largest, Long Road, and its own average points figure of 42.4 sits close to the Cambridgeshire and England averages either side of it, which is a very different story from most of the other rows. Cardiff Sixth Form College, Cambridge, tops the table on progress at +1.28, a score whose entire confidence interval — 0.92 to 1.64 — sits above zero despite a cohort of only 53. Cambridge Arts and Sciences (CATS and CSVPA), a similarly small independent college with 42 students, sits at the opposite end: -1.31, with a confidence interval running from -2.22 to -0.39, wide enough that a handful of students moved it considerably, but still entirely below zero.

The One Cambridge School Where Almost Every Student Takes Further Maths

Cambridge Maths School is a specialist state free school on Mill Road that teaches only the two sixth-form years, built around mathematics and computer science. Its 2024/25 subjects-entered table shows exactly 42 A-level Mathematics entries and exactly 42 A-level Further Mathematics entries, against a cohort of 43 students with an A-level entry — no other Cambridge provider comes close to that ratio. At a typical Cambridge sixth form, Further Mathematics is the smaller of the two entries by a wide margin; here the two numbers are identical, meaning almost the entire cohort takes both as full A-levels rather than treating Further Maths as an optional extra for a handful of specialists.

The results that go with it are among the strongest in the city on every measure this page tracks, and the outright highest on two of them. Its average grade was A+, 53.08 points per entry, the highest of any Cambridge provider, including the much larger independent schools. Its progress score, +0.65, is WELL ABOVE AVERAGE, second only to Cardiff Sixth Form College's +1.28 among the city's sixteen providers, and 81.4% of its 43 students reached AAB or higher including at least two facilitating subjects — the highest AAB rate in the city, and more than 3.5 times the Cambridgeshire state-funded rate of 22.9%. On the Department for Education's measure of students who held a GCSE maths grade 4 or above and went on to an approved advanced maths qualification, it recorded 100%, a figure only one other Cambridge provider, Cardiff Sixth Form College, matches.

Cambridge's Five Independent Sixth-Form Colleges, and a 2.59-Point Progress Spread

Alongside its long-established independent schools, Cambridge has five institutions the Department for Education classifies specifically as independent sixth-form colleges rather than schools: Abbey College Cambridge, St. Andrew's College Cambridge, Cambridge Arts and Sciences (trading as CATS and CSVPA), Mander Portman Woodward and Cardiff Sixth Form College, Cambridge. Several of these run one-year A-level courses and grade retakes, and several enrol international students joining partway through a two-year qualification — a different intake pattern from a conventional two-year sixth form, and one that this page's progress-score column is precisely designed to look past intake for.

Their 2024/25 progress scores span from -1.31 at Cambridge Arts and Sciences to +1.28 at Cardiff Sixth Form College, a spread of 2.59 points — those two colleges are also the lowest- and highest-scoring of all sixteen Cambridge providers, so the sharper test of whether independent sixth-form colleges vary more than other Cambridge providers is against the city's five academies, which span only 0.41 points, from Chesterton Community College's +0.22 to Long Road Sixth Form College's -0.19. Mander Portman Woodward, at +0.47, is also banded WELL ABOVE AVERAGE despite a cohort built substantially around retakes, which is worth setting against the assumption that a retake-focused college necessarily posts a weaker value-added score than a conventional sixth form. All five colleges have cohorts between 36 and 100 students in their headline measures, and the Department for Education's own guidance is explicit that smaller cohorts carry wider confidence intervals, where individual students can move a score considerably from one year to the next.

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How Many Cambridge A-Level Students Are Retained to the End of the Course?

The Department for Education marks retention "NA" at every independent school, so a citywide retention figure cannot be built the way the Mathematics entry total above was. Among the seven state-funded Cambridge providers where a rate is published, Cambridge Maths School recorded 97.7% from 44 students enrolled to study mainly A levels, Hills Road Sixth Form College 96.8% from 1,458, Chesterton Community College 96.1% from 51, The Netherhall School 93.0% from 100, Long Road Sixth Form College 89.9% from 696 and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology 86.9% from 61 — against a Cambridgeshire state-funded average of 94.7% and an England state-funded average of 93.1%.

Cambridge Regional College's rate is marked "NE", the Department for Education's code for no data available at that measure, consistent with a five-student A-level cohort inside a much larger vocational college. The widest retention gap among the six state-funded providers where a figure exists is between Cambridge Maths School's 97.7% and Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology's 86.9%, a 10.8-point spread. Hills Road Sixth Form College's own gap over the same college is narrower, 96.8% against 86.9% (9.9 points), and it sits alongside a similar gap in the two providers' AAB rates — 30.9% against 18.8% — rather than moving in the opposite direction, which is not guaranteed: a provider can retain well and still post modest attainment, or the reverse.

Which Cambridge Sixth Form Actually Turns a GCSE Maths Grade Into an Advanced Qualification?

The Department for Education publishes one more maths-specific figure for every provider: the share of students who already held a GCSE maths grade 4 or above at the end of Key Stage 4 and went on to achieve an approved advanced-level maths qualification. It is not a proportion of the A-level cohort alone, and no league table publishes it school by school for Cambridge, so here it is for all sixteen.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, "Achieving advanced level maths qualifications", read on each of the sixteen providers' 16-to-18 pages, results for 2024/25, read on 28 August 2026. The Cambridgeshire and England rows are state-funded schools and colleges.

Cambridgeshire's 34.7% is more than four percentage points above England's 30.0%, which is the real reason a Cambridge-specific page on this subject is worth building: the county's post-16 population converts a GCSE maths grade into an advanced qualification more often than England's does. Inside the city the spread is far wider than that county-to-England gap suggests: 100.0% at Cambridge Maths School and Cardiff Sixth Form College, down to 0.5% at Cambridge Regional College, the smallest A-level cohort in the city at 5 students, and, among providers with a larger cohort, 15.5% at The Netherhall School and 12.8% at Long Road Sixth Form College — a gap of more than 80 percentage points in whether a Cambridge student who arrives with a grade 4 leaves with an advanced maths qualification, depending on which sixth form they attend. Long Road's own figure sitting well below the Cambridgeshire average it is measured against, at a college that also posted the third-lowest progress score in the city, is one of the more direct findings on this page rather than an incidental one.

How Should You Read These Cambridge Figures Without Being Misled?

Everything above describes a provider, not a student. A student at Cambridge Maths School, inside a cohort averaging A+, can be exactly as far from their own target grade as one at a provider averaging a C, and the gap that matters for tutoring is between a current working grade and the grade an offer needs. Every percentage on this page has its own denominator, printed in the cell wherever it differs from the students column beside it, and the Cambridgeshire and England comparator columns are county-wide and national respectively — DfE publishes no Cambridge-city aggregate for any of them.

Which specification a student is entered for changes the shape of the papers rather than the content behind them, since the Department for Education has set that content centrally for first teaching from 2017, with no modules on any board. The four an English sixth form is most likely to be using are AQA 7357, Pearson Edexcel 9MA0, OCR H240 and OCR Mathematics B (MEI) H640, each confirmed on its own board's site; the equivalent Further Mathematics codes are AQA 7367, Pearson Edexcel 9FM0, OCR H245 and OCR Further Mathematics B (MEI) H645, and confusing the Mathematics B code with the Further Mathematics B code is a common error worth checking a sixth form's own curriculum booklet against. Some Cambridge independent schools, including The Stephen Perse Foundation, also teach the International Baccalaureate alongside A-levels; our IB tuition page covers that route separately.

For the small number of Cambridge students applying to study Mathematics at Cambridge or Oxford specifically, STEP and TMUA sit on top of the A-level rather than inside it, and preparation for those admissions tests is a distinct, later-stage need this page does not cover; our STEP preparation page addresses it directly. Families earlier in the same schools will find GCSE-stage support on our GCSE tuition page, and students weighing up sixth-form entry itself, rather than results once there, on our 16+ tuition in Cambridge page. Our broader A-level tuition service covers the other subjects a Cambridge student is likely to be carrying alongside maths, and our A-level maths tuition page sets out how we teach the subject itself.

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