GCSE Maths Tutors Croydon: What Two Summers of Data Show

Leading Tuition is a one-to-one tutoring company whose expert GCSE maths tutors work with Croydon pupils at both Foundation and Higher tier. DfE's provisional summer 2026 data puts 71.3% of the 4,122 maths entries at 33 Croydon schools at grade 4 or above, up from 68.4% in 2024/25, while England's share was 71.4%. Between those two summers, each of Croydon's larger schools moved by 6.0 points on average, up or down.

The sections below set out which Croydon schools DfE publishes, how far each school's rates moved in a year and how much of that is more than cohort size explains, whether a school's pass rate predicts its top grades, and what our tutors do with each fact.

Which Croydon schools' GCSE maths results does DfE publish for summer 2026?

Croydon is one local authority in DfE's file (code 306), and every school below is registered in the borough on the Get Information about Schools register (GIAS). DfE holds a KS4 row for 39 Croydon schools; 34 of them have GCSE (9-1) maths rows, 4,126 entries in all, and 33 of those publish a grade breakdown covering 4,122.

Schools with fewer than 50 entries are left out of the comparisons. At that size a single entry moves a school's share by 2 points, and the 95% interval on a share is about 13 points either side. Nine schools fall below the cut, with 118 entries between them (2.9% of the borough's 4,126), and each is named in the second table with its entry total.

Source: DfE, Key stage 4 performance 2025/26 (provisional), 'Subject school level exam data', GCSE (9-1) Full Course Mathematics, number of entries at grade, dataset version 2.0 published 15 October 2026, queried 17 October 2026 and checked again on 24 October 2026; school type from GIAS. Columns 9 to 1 are GCSE grades; in DfE's wording U is ungraded or unclassified and X is absent or results pending. A dash means DfE shows no entries at that grade: grades 1 to 9, U and X add up to each school's total.

The schools under the cut are listed here with their entry totals, and no grade or share is attached to any of them.

Source: DfE, Key stage 4 performance 2025/26 (provisional), indicator 'Number of entries at grade'; school type from GIAS.

DfE's own footnote says individual grade breakdowns are suppressed where a school has 5 or fewer entries, which is why Olympus has a total and no grades. A small entry total can sit on a small cohort or a large one, so we checked DfE's count of pupils at the end of KS4: 43 against 10 entries at Bensham Manor School. At Olympus it is 7 against 4. Neither total hides a large school.

Whichever school a pupil attends, our tutors start from the pupil's own mock papers, tier and exam board; the school's row shows only the group the pupil sits in.

Why are Whitgift, Trinity, Royal Russell and Croydon High not in the maths table?

DfE's file has KS4 rows for four of Croydon's independent schools but no GCSE (9-1) maths row for any of them: Whitgift School (229 pupils at the end of KS4), Royal Russell School (144), Trinity School (139) and Croydon High School (95), 607 pupils between them. The New School (9 pupils) has none either. These schools do have rows for other subjects, and Whitgift's include Mathematics (Additional) with 47 entries, so the gap is in the maths data and not in the schools' absence from DfE's file.

DfE's file does not say why, and we do not guess: a school's own published results page is the place to look, and our GCSE tuition in Croydon page sets out Trinity's and Royal Russell's own published results. Fidelis College is in the table, but its 94 maths entries sit against 156 pupils at the end of KS4, so its row describes only part of its year group.

For pupils at these schools, our tutors work from the maths specification and exam board the school actually enters them for, which the first call establishes.

How far did each Croydon school's grade 4 and grade 7 rates move in a year?

Between summer 2025 and summer 2026, the 24 schools with 50 or more entries in both years moved by 6.0 points on average on grade 4+ (median 3.7) and by 5.0 on grade 7+. Four moved by 10 points or more on grade 4+, and four on grade 7+. Taken together the 24 rose from 68.2% to 71.1% at grade 4+ and from 18.0% to 20.7% at grade 7+.

We tested each school's change, after allowing for the 24 schools' combined rise, against the noise its two cohort sizes alone would produce (a two-sided test at the 5% level, each year's entries treated as independent), which about one school in 20 passes by chance, or 1.2 of the 24.

On that test three schools moved by more than cohort size explains on grade 4+: Archbishop Tenison's CofE High School (down), and St Mary's Catholic High School and The Quest Academy (up). Six did on grade 7+: The Archbishop Lanfranc Academy, St Mary's Catholic High School, Oasis Academy Coulsdon and Harris Academy Purley (up), and Meridian High School and Ark Blake Academy (down). Chance alone would give about one in each case.

Two schools show the two measures moving apart. Harris Academy Purley's grade 4+ share moved by +1.7 points while its grade 7+ share moved by +13.6; at Archbishop Tenison's CofE High School the moves were −12.7 and +0.5.

Source: DfE, Key stage 4 performance, 'Subject school level exam data': 2025/26 (provisional, version 2.0) and 2024/25 (version 1.0.2, April 2026). Shares are entries at the grade or above divided by total exam entries. Schools with fewer than 50 entries in either year are excluded.

None of this is data being revised. For the same 24 schools we compared the October 2025 first release of the 2024/25 figures with the version DfE published in April 2026: 52 grade counts changed, each by one or two entries, and no school's grade 4+ share moved by more than 1.7 points (grade 7+: 0.3). That is small beside a 6.0-point average movement. The comparison is still between a provisional year and a revised one, so the 2025/26 figures may move when DfE next updates them in February 2027.

Because a school's grade 4+ share moves by 6.0 points in a year, our tutors do not set a pupil's target from last year's school figure; they set it from the pupil's own mock papers and the tier and board the school enters them for.

Are the summer 2026 figures final, and why is there no Progress 8?

DfE says plainly that "The data in this release is provisional." The grades were announced on 20 August 2026, DfE's Key stage 4 performance release for 2025/26 was published on 15 October 2026, and the next release is due in February 2027. Progress 8 will not be published for 2024/25 or 2025/26, because the pupils in those years did not take key stage 2 assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DfE therefore gives no figure for how much progress pupils at a Croydon school made in maths, and the grade shares on this page describe results, not value added. A school with a high grade 7+ share may have had a strong intake, and one with a low share a weaker one; this file cannot tell the two apart.

A tutor cannot change a school's intake or a cohort's luck, but can find from the pupil's own papers which topics lose the pupil marks; that diagnostic is the first thing our tutors do.

Can two Croydon schools share a pass rate and still differ at grade 7?

Yes, and the two-summer figures show it. Pooling 2024/25 and 2025/26 gives each school between 221 and 433 entries and narrows the cohort noise. Six schools sit within 5.4 points of each other on pooled grade 4+ (72.9% to 78.2%), yet their pooled grade 7+ shares run from 14.4% at BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology to 31.6% at Harris Academy Purley. The 95% intervals at those two ends do not overlap.

Source: DfE, Key stage 4 performance, 'Subject school level exam data', 2024/25 (version 1.0.2) and 2025/26 (provisional, version 2.0) entries pooled; 95% Wilson intervals. The six are the schools whose pooled grade 4+ share falls between 72.5% and 78.5%; the band was chosen on grade 4+ alone.

A family reading a school's grade 4+ share has learned about the pass line, not the top end: grade 4+ counts everyone from grade 4 upwards, and grade 7+ is the bar one Croydon sixth form sets for A-level maths (see the questions below). Each school's own two-summer figures sit in the table above rather than in a single borough average.

For a pupil aiming at grade 7 or above, our tutors build Higher-tier problem-solving papers into the programme whatever the school's own grade 7+ share is.

How do our Croydon GCSE maths tutors work from a pupil's own results?

Every programme starts with a short diagnostic against the pupil's own school work, exam board and tier, so a tutor can see whether the priority is closing a topic gap, building timed exam technique or stretching beyond the school's scheme of work. Sessions run one-to-one online with a shared whiteboard: tutors work through past-paper questions, mark answers against the real mark scheme, and review progress against the pupil's own target grade at agreed intervals.

91% of our students achieve their desired grades. For Croydon's wider GCSE picture see GCSE tuition in Croydon, and for sixth-form maths see our Croydon A-level maths page.

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