A Level English Tutors Guildford 2026

Eight Guildford sixth forms have a published 2024/25 DfE score for A-level English Literature. Together they score -0.16 (interval -0.34 to +0.02) against +0.02 for the rest of Surrey, a gap whose interval, -0.37 to +0.00, only just reaches zero; only George Abbot's own interval, -0.77 to -0.05, lies wholly below zero.

Set against each school's own all-subjects score, Literature falls 0.33 short in Guildford and 0.14 short in the rest of Surrey, so this is a Surrey pattern that Guildford may show more strongly, not a finding about Guildford alone. These combined figures are our calculation, not DfE statistics, and George Abbot carries much of the Guildford result: without it the pooled Literature score is -0.08.

Which Sixth Forms Count as Guildford for A-Level English, and Which Surrey Colleges Do Not?

The Department for Education publishes no table for Guildford. It publishes A-level value added school by school, and the borough's schools sit inside the Surrey table, local authority 936, alongside Godalming College in Waverley, Reigate College in Reigate and Banstead, Esher Sixth Form College in Elmbridge and Woking College in Woking, none of which is in Guildford. English is three subjects in that dataset, English Literature, English Language and English Language & Literature, and 60 Surrey providers have a row in at least one of them for 2024/25.

The rule is one test: a provider counts as Guildford if the District field on its own Get Information about Schools (GIAS) record reads Guildford. We joined the DfE rows to the GIAS extract of 17 October 2026 on each school's URN, not its name, and read the GIAS page of every school we kept. On that field the 60 providers fall as Waverley 9, Guildford 9, Elmbridge 8, Mole Valley 6, Epsom and Ewell 6, Reigate and Banstead 5, Tandridge 5, Spelthorne 4, Runnymede 3, Woking 3 and Surrey Heath 2. The nine in Guildford are George Abbot, Guildford County, Guildford High, Howard of Effingham, Prior's Field, Royal Grammar School Guildford, St Peter's Catholic, St Teresa's and Tormead. Eight have a published Literature score. Prior's Field's is suppressed, and DfE's subjects-entered table shows how small the cohort is: 3 students entered for it.

A postcode lookup (postcodes.io) returns the same district for 59 of the 60 postcodes; the exception, Blenheim High School in Epsom, has a postcode that returns no result and a GIAS district of Epsom and Ewell, so it is not a Guildford candidate on either test. A GU postcode would have been a poorer test: 20 of the 60 providers carry one, but only 7 of the 20 are in the borough. The other 13 are in Waverley (8), Woking (3) and Surrey Heath (2), while Howard of Effingham (KT24) and St Teresa's (RH5) are in the borough with no GU postcode at all.

We also looked for rows that combine several schools, because a sixth-form-centre row is the sum of its members and would count the same students twice. Read in both directions, the GIAS links show one sixth-form-centre link touching the 60 providers, Halliford School in Spelthorne, whose centre has no row in this table, so nobody here is counted twice. Guildford College has no row of its own in the DfE file, and the A-level list on its own site, which it marks provisional, includes English Language and Literature; it is in none of the tables below.

Which of the Three A-Level Englishes Does Each Guildford Sixth Form Enter?

DfE's subjects-entered table counts exam entries; the value-added tables later on this page count matched entries, the students DfE could link to GCSE results, which run one or two lower. They are different measures and each is labelled. For 2024/25 the subjects-entered table records these A-level entries for the nine providers.

All nine enter students for Literature; three also enter Language and two also enter the combined course; none enters all three. Of the 153 entries across the three subjects, 111 are Literature. Howard of Effingham also lists 3 AS entries (1 Language and 2 Literature), which are not counted here.

Already know which sixth form your child is heading for? Book a free consultation about A-level English tuition for that board and its set texts.

What Does Each Guildford Sixth Form Print About Board, GCSE Grade and Set Texts for A-Level English?

This section reads each school's own current document. The table covers eight of the nine providers; Royal Grammar School Guildford is not in it, and the board count below covers those eight only. Several documents describe their texts as the current or a possible list.

The St Teresa's row uses the 2026-27 course guide of the Effingham Sixth Form, the sixth form of the Effingham Schools Trust, which St Teresa's belongs to. We assume it describes the same English department as the 2024/25 DfE row for St Teresa's; we cannot confirm that.

Eight documents name a board for Literature: four Edexcel (Guildford High, Howard of Effingham, Prior's Field and Tormead), three AQA (Guildford County and St Teresa's on Specification A, St Peter's on Literature B) and one OCR (George Abbot). Royal Grammar School Guildford is not among the eight.

Where a document prints a GCSE English grade, it reads as follows. George Abbot asks for 5 in English Language and 5 in English Literature, for both of its English courses. Howard of Effingham asks for 6 in Literature and 5 in Language, or 5 in both for its Language course. St Peter's asks for 6 in both and Tormead for 7 in both. Prior's Field asks for 6 in Literature. Guildford High asks for grade 9 or 8 at I/GCSE in subjects being studied at A-level, with a minimum of seven I/GCSEs at grades 9-7. Royal Grammar School Guildford's admissions page expects a grade 7 to 9 in each subject to be studied, with at least six grades 7 to 9 including English and Mathematics.

George Abbot's two guides on the school's site give different partner texts for the comparative paper. The 2026-27 guide pairs The Great Gatsby with Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and the 2027-28 guide pairs it with Nella Larsen's Passing. Both give the course as OCR H472, and both advise buying an AQA English Literature A textbook and mention an AQA poetry anthology. We report that as the documents print it and do not resolve it: a family should confirm with the department which board's papers its students sit and which partner text applies to their year.

The Great Gatsby appears in four of the eight documents and does a different job in each. At George Abbot it is one half of OCR's comparative and contextual paper. In the Guildford County handbook and the Effingham guide it sits in the first paper of AQA Specification A, where Guildford County pairs it with the AQA poetry anthology in an open-book comparison. At Guildford High it is the fixed text in Edexcel's coursework essay, alongside a second text chosen from a list. The same novel therefore asks for a different kind of essay depending on the school's board.

Three documents give the length of the independent essay: Guildford County and the Effingham guide say 2,500 words on AQA Specification A, and Guildford High says 2,500 to 3,000 words on Edexcel. In all three it is 20% of the A-level, and Guildford County's handbook says it is assessed by teachers and moderated by AQA.

Weighing these Guildford sixth forms for A-level English? Book a free consultation about tuition for the board and texts your child's school actually teaches.

Do Guildford's Eight Published English Literature Scores Clear Zero?

DfE's 2024/25 subject value added compares a school's A-level English Literature students with students nationally who started from the same GCSE results, and zero is the national figure. Beside each Literature row is the same school's all-subjects score from the same DfE dataset, because the contrast between them is the subject of the next section. These are the nine Guildford rows, as published. DfE's score is a progress measure for one year's entrants and is not a measure of teaching quality.

Only George Abbot's interval, -0.77 to -0.05, sits wholly below zero, on the largest cohort, 26 matched entries. The other seven published intervals cross zero, so their scores are consistent with performing above, at or below the national figure, and none is wholly above. Five of the eight point estimates are negative, from -0.03 at Tormead to -0.53 at Royal Grammar School Guildford; that is a pattern in the point estimates, not a finding, because each of those intervals allows either sign.

The last column puts each school's Literature interval beside its own all-subjects interval. At two schools, George Abbot and Royal Grammar School Guildford, the Literature interval lies wholly below the all-subjects interval; at the other six the two overlap, and at none does Literature sit wholly above. That count means something only against a base rate. Among the 1,753 English schools with both scores published, Literature sits wholly below the school's own all-subjects interval at 72 (4.1%) and wholly above it at 80 (4.6%), so fewer than one of eight schools would be expected to show it by chance, and two of Guildford's eight do. In the rest of Surrey it is 4 of 36 below and 1 above. These are counts of figures, not a judgement on either school: a Literature cohort of 11 or 26 students is small, and nothing here says why the two scores differ.

Language and the combined course add little. Three Guildford schools have a published Language score, Guildford County -0.22 on 9 matched entries, Howard of Effingham -0.02 on 12 and St Peter's -0.44 on 10, and every interval crosses zero. Pooled they score -0.21 (-0.51 to +0.09) against +0.09 (-0.04 to +0.21) for the other 8 published Language rows in Surrey, a difference of -0.30 whose interval, -0.62 to +0.03, includes zero. The combined course has one published Guildford row, George Abbot's 0.18 (-0.45 to 0.82) on 7 matched entries; Guildford High's is suppressed.

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Counted Together, Do Guildford's English Literature Scores Differ From the Rest of Surrey's?

Counted as one group, Guildford's eight published Literature departments score -0.16 (interval -0.34 to +0.02, 106 matched entries) and the 36 published departments in the rest of Surrey score +0.02 (-0.04 to +0.08, 919 matched entries); the difference, -0.18, has an interval of -0.37 to +0.00, so it only just reaches zero and is not established. DfE publishes no combined figure for either group: both are our calculation from published rows.

Each score is weighted by how precisely it is measured: its standard error is half the published interval's width divided by 1.96, and each score counts in proportion to one over that standard error squared. Weighting by matched entries instead gives the same answer to two decimal places.

The last column is the more telling comparison. A school's all-subjects score carries its intake and the general strength of its sixth form, so subtracting it from the school's Literature score leaves what is particular to Literature. Across Guildford's eight schools Literature runs 0.33 of a grade below their all-subjects score (interval -0.51 to -0.14). Across the rest of Surrey it runs 0.14 below (-0.20 to -0.08), and across 1,753 English schools it runs 0.01 above (0.00 to +0.02), which shows the arithmetic has no tilt of its own. Both Surrey figures are wholly below zero, so Literature trailing a school's own all-subjects score is a Surrey pattern. Guildford's is larger by 0.19, but that difference has an interval of -0.38 to +0.00, which only just reaches zero, so we do not claim Guildford's is deeper than the county's.

Overall, the borough and the county are level: Guildford's eight schools score +0.17 across all their subjects against +0.14 for the rest of Surrey, a difference of +0.03 with an interval of -0.01 to +0.07. English Literature is where they part. Among the nine subjects with seven or more published Guildford departments in the same DfE table, Literature has the lowest pooled Guildford score at -0.16, below History at -0.05, Geography at +0.05 and Psychology at +0.07, and well below Economics at +0.20, Chemistry at +0.28, Physics at +0.28, Mathematics at +0.38 and Biology at +0.39; our Guildford Physics page shows the Physics working. In the rest of Surrey Literature is also the lowest of the nine, at +0.02.

One school carries much of the Guildford result. George Abbot has the largest Literature cohort, 26 of the 106 matched entries, and the only interval wholly below zero; without it the pooled Literature score is -0.08 (-0.29 to +0.12, 80 matched entries), and Literature's gap to the same schools' all-subjects score is 0.23 (-0.44 to -0.02). Removing any other single school leaves the pooled Literature score between -0.12 and -0.22.

How Far Can the Pooled Figures Be Trusted?

Nothing guarantees that DfE's measure adds up the way our arithmetic does, so we tested it where DfE publishes the combined answer. A sixth-form-centre row in the DfE file is the sum of its member schools, which GIAS links by URN. Across England, 12 centres have published rows where every member is also published and the members' matched entries add up to the centre's: 134 centre-and-subject rows, 9 of them English. In every one of the 134, pooling the members this way reproduces DfE's published value and both ends of its interval to within 0.01; the largest difference is 0.009.

The same test shows where the method stops working. In the 42 centre rows where a member's row is suppressed or absent, the pooled figure from the published members alone drifts from DfE's by up to 0.165. The Guildford figures therefore cover the eight published Literature departments only: Prior's Field's 3 students are in none of them.

Two more limits. We treat each school's Literature and all-subjects scores as independent, but Literature is only 2.3% to 6.1% of each school's all-subjects matched entries, so this makes the intervals slightly wider than they need to be, not narrower. And a pooled figure describes 106 students as a group: it says nothing about any one department's teaching, which is why no cause is given for any figure on this page.

What Can a Tutor Change in A-Level English for a Guildford Student, and What Stays With the School?

Two things in this page's evidence decide what is worth doing outside school. The first is the board and the texts: a student at Guildford High (Edexcel 9ET0, with Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Mrs Dalloway for prose) and one at George Abbot (OCR H472, with Othello and Ibsen's play on the pre-1900 paper) revise from different mark schemes and different books, so past papers, mark schemes and examiner reports should come from the student's own board and the text list their department names. See our guides to the Edexcel, AQA and OCR A-level English Literature specifications.

The second is the essay itself. Every Literature specification named in the documents above puts 20% of the grade on non-exam assessment, and Guildford County's handbook gives AQA Specification A's assessment-objective weights as 28% for AO1, 24% each for AO2 and AO3, and 12% each for AO4 and AO5: the marks for context and for connections and interpretations are not a minor extra. How a student frames a comparison, uses a critic and chooses the second text is work a tutor can do alongside the school's teaching, from the student's own marked essays.

What stays with the school is the choice of texts, the teaching of them and the marking of the non-exam assessment. The DfE figures describe cohorts of 6 to 26 students and are no basis for choosing between schools, or for deciding that a particular student needs help. They are a reason to ask a department which board it uses, which texts it has chosen this year and how it marks the coursework. Students working with us across the borough may also find our Guildford tuition overview and our A-level English page useful.

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