A-Level Biology Tutors in Guildford 2026

In DfE's 2024/25 data, A-level Biology in Guildford Borough is taught at nine sixth forms, and their own course documents show they do not share a specification: six state AQA, two Edexcel Biology A and one names OCR. Together they made 225 Biology entries. DfE's progress measure, which is not a measure of teaching quality, puts four of their intervals wholly above zero and none below.

Which A-Level Biology Specification Does Each Guildford Sixth Form Teach?

Every school on this page publishes course documents, and each names an awarding body for Biology. Table 1 records what the document says and names it, so that a family can find the sentence for themselves. All nine were read on 29 September 2026, and the table gives the edition of each.

Counted from Table 1, six schools state AQA, two state Edexcel Biology A and one names OCR: six, two and one across the nine. Guildford High School also lists Biology among its one-year AS Level subjects, examined at the end of the Lower Sixth.

Two identifiers were checked against the awarding body itself. Pearson's specification is titled Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Biology A (Salters-Nuffield) (9BN0), which is the code Prior's Field prints, and OCR's own page for its Biology A specification, H420, is live. St Teresa's guide prints no code, so this page records OCR and assigns it no specification. AQA's own site returned an error to a scripted request and rendered blank in a browser, so every AQA entry in Table 1 is the school's own statement and nothing more.

What separates Edexcel's Biology A from its Biology B is set out on our Edexcel A-level Biology page. The AQA and OCR courses have pages of their own, AQA A-level Biology and OCR A-level Biology, and the subject overview is A-level Biology. None of that is repeated here; this page is about which of them each Guildford sixth form has chosen.

What GCSE Grades Do Guildford's Sixth Forms Ask For in Biology?

Each school words its bar differently, so Table 2 gives it as printed, next to any fieldwork the Biology documents mention.

Read as printed, three schools set the Biology bar at grade 6 (Howard of Effingham, George Abbot and Prior's Field), four at grade 7 (Guildford County, Royal Grammar School Guildford, St Peter's and Tormead) and one at grade 9 or 8 (Guildford High). For St Teresa's no Biology grade was found. Three, four, one and one make nine. The wording is not uniform: St Peter's and George Abbot ask for a pair of grades in Combined Science, Prior's Field calls its grade a recommended minimum, and Tormead calls its grade expected.

Royal Grammar School Guildford's figure comes from two places, and they differ in kind. Its admissions page, which is text, says candidates are expected to gain a grade 7 to 9 at GCSE in each subject to be studied at A Level. The Biology page of its guide, which exists only as page images, says grade 7 or above in GCSE Biology. The grade is therefore cross-checked; the AQA attribution in Table 1 rests on the images alone.

Six of the nine sets of Biology documents mention fieldwork in text. Three call it residential: Guildford High's is compulsory and lasts three days, St Teresa's lasts four days, and Tormead's goes to Slapton. The timing differs where it is stated: the summer term of Year 12 at George Abbot, Year 13 at St Peter's and the second year at Guildford County. The Biology documents of Howard of Effingham and Prior's Field mention none that could be found, and Royal Grammar School Guildford's is not recorded here because its guide is the one document available only as images.

What Do DfE's Intervals Say About Guildford's Nine Biology Departments?

DfE's technical guidance describes its value-added measures as showing how well students did in their qualifications compared with other students who had similar prior attainment nationally. The figures below come from the Schools and colleges - qualification and subject value added data set, version 1.0.1, part of DfE's A level and other 16 to 18 results statistics and published on 23 April 2026. Each is DfE's value-added progress measure for 2024/25 entrants and is not a measure of teaching quality.

Four of the nine intervals sit wholly above zero, five span it and none sits wholly below. With only nine rows, and a measure that already adjusts for each student's prior attainment, that split is no basis for ranking the schools or for reading a cause into it.

DfE's dataset labels the matched-entries column “Number of entries”. Set beside each school's own Compare School Performance total of Biology entries, it is equal or lower at every school: 216 of the nine schools' 225 entries in all (96%), and no school below 10 of 12 (83%). This page calls it matched entries because it counts the students DfE could score, not because that is DfE's label.

What Parents Say

DP

Deborah Prior

★★★★★

Confidence and progress

My son was low in confidence after COVID and the gaps in learning were building up. Using this service helped plug those gaps, rebuild confidence, and improve his ability to learn properly again.

NI

Nicola

★★★★★

Amazing tutors!

We arranged maths and English tuition ahead of GCSEs and both tutors were brilliant. My daughter's grades improved, and by results day she achieved two grades higher than in her mock exams.

S

Saifan Khan

★★★★★

Great Teaching and Focused Learning

I attended an English bootcamp with Leading Tuition and the experience was excellent. The teacher gave focused attention to the small group while keeping the lessons interactive and engaging.

See more reviews on Trustpilot

How Precisely Can Any Guildford Biology Department Be Measured?

The largest Biology cohort in Guildford Borough in DfE's data is 37 matched entries, at George Abbot School, whose Compare total is also 37. That figure sets a ceiling on how precisely any of the nine departments can be measured, and Table 3 shows it in the intervals.

In DfE's value-added progress measure, which is not a measure of teaching quality, George Abbot School's interval (0.21 to 0.9, 37 matched entries) is 0.69 wide and Prior's Field School's (-1.07 to 0.64, 6 matched entries) is 1.71 wide. Across the nine schools the widths run from 0.69 to 1.71.

Those widths are not free-floating. On each of the 54 published Surrey Biology rows, half the interval multiplied by the square root of the matched entries and divided by 1.96 comes to between 1.05 and 1.08, so an interval's width follows the number of students scored and little else. The width says how many students were scored. The part that varies from school to school is where the interval sits: wholly on one side of zero, or across it.

For Guildford the consequence is plain. With cohorts of 6 to 37 matched entries, no department's score can be placed tightly, and a point estimate is best read as a position somewhere inside an interval between 0.69 and 1.71 wide. Four of the nine intervals still sit wholly above zero at those widths, which is the firmest thing these nine rows say, and five span zero.

How Were the Nine Found, and Which Surrey Rows Were Left Out?

DfE publishes this data by local authority. Guildford is a district of Surrey (local authority 936), so the Biology table for “Surrey” has 60 rows. The rule used here is that a school counts if GIAS, the Department's register of schools, records its District as Guildford. Nine of the 60 do; the other 51 are spread over ten other districts, as Table 4 shows.

Two checks support the rule. An ONS-based postcode lookup agrees with GIAS's District on 59 of the 60 rows; the exception is Blenheim High School, recorded in Epsom and Ewell, whose postcode has been terminated and no longer resolves. And the obvious shortcut, a filter on GU postcodes, would find only seven of the nine: 18 of the 60 rows carry a GU postcode, 7 of those are in the borough and 11 are not. Two borough schools, Howard of Effingham (KT24) and St Teresa's (RH5), carry postcodes outside the GU area.

All nine were recorded as Open in GIAS on 29 September 2026. Two of the 60 rows sit against URNs that GIAS records as closed, All Hallows Catholic School (closed 30 September 2024) and St Andrew's Catholic School (closed 31 May 2025), and neither is in Guildford. Guildford College is not among the 72 Surrey school locations in the dataset, so DfE's Biology table has no row for it. Our A-level Maths tutors in Guildford page covers the same nine schools for Maths.

Where Else Can a Guildford Student Study A-Level Biology?

Three further providers checked for this page publish A-level Biology. None is one of the nine: Godalming College is in Waverley and Woking College in Woking, both outside the borough and therefore outside this page's coverage rule, and Guildford College has no row in the DfE table. Table 5 gives what each says for itself.

Frequently Asked Questions