A Level Physics Tutors Guildford 2026

Seven Guildford sixth forms have a published 2024/25 DfE value-added score for A-level Physics, and only George Abbot School and Guildford County School clear zero on their own. Pooled, the seven score +0.28 (interval +0.10 to +0.45) across 182 matched entries, yet the rest of Surrey scores +0.24, so the borough sits +0.03 from it (interval -0.15 to +0.22): above the national figure, and indistinguishable from the rest of its county.

The +0.28 is our calculation from published rows, not a DfE statistic; the pooling section shows the arithmetic and the published case it was checked against.

Which Physics Providers Count as Guildford, and Why Are Godalming and Reigate Left Out?

Guildford is a borough inside Surrey, not a local authority of its own, so the Department for Education publishes A-level Physics value added for it inside the Surrey table, local authority 936. That table returned 62 provider rows for 2024/25 when we queried it: 45 with a published score, covering 1,215 matched entries, and 17 suppressed. Read straight down it is a county table. Godalming College is in Waverley, Reigate College in Reigate and Banstead, Esher Sixth Form College in Elmbridge and Woking College in Woking, and none of them is in Guildford borough.

The coverage rule is a single test: a provider is in scope if the District field on its own Get Information about Schools record reads Guildford. We joined the 62 DfE rows to the GIAS all-establishment extract of 16 October 2026 on each school's URN rather than its name, and read the Details page of every school we kept. On that field the 62 rows fall as Waverley 10, Elmbridge 8, Guildford 8, Mole Valley 6, Epsom and Ewell 6, Reigate and Banstead 6, Tandridge 5, Runnymede 4, Spelthorne 4, Woking 3 and Surrey Heath 2, which sum to 62. Eight are Guildford, and seven of those eight have a published score.

We checked that field against an independent source. A postcode lookup (postcodes.io) returns the same local-authority district for 61 of the 62 postcodes. The exception is Blenheim High School in Epsom, whose postcode returns no result and whose GIAS district is Epsom and Ewell, so it is not a Guildford candidate either way.

The shortcut of keeping every row with a GU postcode gets the answer wrong in both directions. Twenty of the 62 rows carry a GU postcode, and only six of those twenty are in the borough. The other fourteen sit in Waverley (All Hallows, Charterhouse, Cranleigh, Frensham Heights, Godalming College, King Edward's Witley, More House, St Catherine's and The Royal School), Woking (Hoe Valley, St John the Baptist and Woking College) and Surrey Heath (Collingwood College and Gordon's). Two borough schools carry no GU postcode at all: Howard of Effingham School is addressed in Leatherhead (KT24) and St Teresa's School in Dorking (RH5).

Two features of the eight matter for how far the table can be read. The four biggest Physics cohorts in the whole Surrey table are sixth-form colleges, Godalming College with 109 matched entries, Reigate College 103, Esher Sixth Form College 87 and Woking College 53, and all four are outside the borough; the largest borough cohort is Royal Grammar School Guildford's 44. And no row among the 62 is a sixth-form-centre row that pools other schools: the only sixth-form-centre link on GIAS that touches any of the 62 URNs belongs to Halliford School in Spelthorne, whose centre record has no row in the table, so the rows count nobody twice.

Prior's Field School is a borough sixth form with no row in the Surrey Physics table. DfE's separate Schools and colleges: A level maths and science file records 0% of its 16 A-level students as entered for Physics in 2024/25; that is the dataset's figure, and it is all this page says about the school. St Teresa's School has a row, but DfE suppresses it. Guildford College has no row of its own in either DfE file, and its own A-level page lists Physics among its subjects while marking the list provisional.

One more Guildford Physics provider is outside every table here because of its age rather than its size. Surrey Maths School in Guildford opened on 1 September 2024 according to GIAS, so its first A-level results came in summer 2026 and it is in neither DfE file for 2024/25. Its own Physics page names OCR A as the board and says all its students also study mathematics. It is in no count or table below.

What Does Each Guildford Sixth Form Print Before It Lets a Student Start A-Level Physics?

This section reads each school's own current document rather than a summary of it. The table covers six of the eight providers: George Abbot School, Guildford County School, Guildford High School, Howard of Effingham School, St Peter's Catholic School and Tormead School. Royal Grammar School Guildford and St Teresa's School are not in it. RGS's sixth-form admissions page asks for a grade 7 to 9 at GCSE in each subject to be studied at A level, with at least six grades 7 to 9 including English and Mathematics, and we give no board for it.

Six schools, three boards. George Abbot and St Peter's name AQA, Guildford County, Guildford High and Tormead name Edexcel, and Howard of Effingham names OCR. The boards also cross over between sciences inside the borough: George Abbot's guide puts Physics with AQA and Chemistry with Edexcel, while Guildford County's handbooks put Physics with Edexcel and Chemistry with AQA, as our A-level Chemistry tutors in Guildford page records. A student who moves between those two schools, or revises from a friend's papers, meets the other board in each science. We keep separate guidance for AQA, Edexcel and OCR A-level Physics.

Where a GCSE Maths grade is printed, it runs from 5 at Howard of Effingham, beside a 6 in Physics, through 6 at George Abbot to 7 at Tormead. Guildford High prints its bar against the Physics GCSE itself, 9 or 8, and St Peter's prints no Maths grade for Physics but names the A-level instead. Those are different ways of saying what a student needs, for a subject whose specification puts at least 40% of its marks on Level 2 mathematics. Our Chemistry page quotes the DfE sentence that fixes that share, so it is not repeated here.

Guildford County's Physics handbook states "a GCSE grade of a B or above is required", in its passage on the subject's mathematical content, and does not name the subject the grade applies to. The same passage says 40% of the A level will be mathematically based. The grade is a letter where every other document in the table uses the 9 to 1 numbers. Its Chemistry handbook, which our Chemistry page covers, warns that students whose maths is not secure at grade 7/8 on the higher tier paper may struggle. Both handbooks sit in the school's Subject Handbooks (2026-28) list. A family reading the Physics one should ask the department which subject the grade applies to and how it reads a letter against the 9 to 1 scale on a student's GCSE certificate.

Tormead's booklet prints two different 40% figures in its Physics entry: Paper 3 is 40% of the total A level marks, and at least 40% of the marks across the three papers reward mathematics at Level 2 or above. One is a paper weighting and the other a share of marks spread over all three papers. They are different quantities that happen to share a number.

At the two AQA schools there is a choice the documents leave open. In AQA's specification, Paper 3 is 80 marks, 45 on practical skills and data analysis and 35 on one optional topic, and the whole A level is 250 marks, so the option carries 14% of the qualification. AQA offers five: astrophysics, medical physics, engineering physics, turning points in physics and electronics. George Abbot's guide lists the topics and says students enter for one section, and St Peter's names the five and says one is chosen. Neither says which one the department teaches. A family at either school should ask early, because the 14% is the one slice of the exam that depends on a choice the school makes.

St Peter's is the only one of the six whose Physics entry names A-level Maths as a condition: "Physics students must study A Level Maths alongside Physics." The other five entries do not state it. Whether a department expects it in practice is a question for the department, not something a document can settle.

Do the Seven Published Guildford Physics Scores Separate One Department From Another?

DfE's 2024/25 subject value added compares a school's A-level Physics students with students nationally who started from the same GCSE results, and zero is the national figure. These are the eight Guildford rows, as published.

Two intervals sit wholly above zero: George Abbot's, 0.21 to 1.01, and Guildford County's, 0.03 to 0.89, whose lower bound is 0.03. The other five cross zero, so their scores are consistent with performing at, above or below the national figure, and no interval is wholly below it. Width follows cohort size: Tormead's nine matched entries leave an interval running from -0.98 to 0.56. St Teresa's suppressed row means no score is published, which is not the same as a low one.

It is tempting to line the entry bars from the last section up against these scores. The two schools clear of zero are George Abbot, whose bar is a 6, and Guildford County, whose handbook asks for a B or above; the schools asking most, Guildford High at 9 or 8 and Tormead at 7 in both subjects, cross zero on 14 and 9 entries. Seven rows cannot support a relationship either way, and value added already allows for where students started, so a school that asks for more is not thereby expected to score higher. This page also sets no school's Physics score against its scores in other subjects, because value added is scored within a single subject.

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What Do the Seven Guildford Departments Score When Counted as One, and Does It Differ From the Rest of Surrey?

A single department's interval is wide because its cohort is small, but the borough's seven published departments between them cover 182 matched entries, and a combined figure is much narrower. We calculated one. It is our own calculation from the seven published rows, not a DfE statistic: DfE publishes no combined Guildford figure.

Each score is weighted by how precisely it is measured. Its standard error is taken as half the published interval's width divided by 1.96, and each score counts in proportion to one over that standard error squared. The entry-weighted mean of the seven, which assumes nothing about the intervals, gives the same answer to two decimal places. The same calculation on the rest of the Surrey table gives the second row below.

The first row clears zero: taken together, Guildford's seven departments finished above the national figure for students with the same prior results. The second row says the same of the rest of the county, and the third says the two cannot be told apart: a difference of 0.03 with an interval from -0.15 to 0.22, which includes zero. Across the 45 published Surrey rows, 33 scores are above zero, 11 below and one exactly zero; ten intervals lie wholly above zero and two wholly below. Positive scores are the Surrey norm, and the borough shares it rather than adding to it.

How far a pooled figure can be trusted is a fair question, because nothing guarantees that DfE's measure adds up the way our arithmetic does. We tested it where DfE publishes the pooled answer. RR6, in Merton, is a sixth-form centre: GIAS links Ricards Lodge High School and Rutlish School to it, and DfE publishes a Physics row for each of the three. Ricards Lodge scores -0.96 on 10 matched entries and Rutlish -0.43 on 23. Their entry-weighted mean over 33 entries is -0.5906, and DfE's own row for RR6 is -0.59 on 33 entries. The interval from the two members, -1.00 to -0.19, is within 0.01 of DfE's published -0.99 to -0.18, which is as close as inputs rounded to two places allow.

That is one published case, with two members, in one borough. It shows that for RR6 our arithmetic reproduces DfE's, not that DfE's measure aggregates this way in general, which is why the Guildford figure carries the label our calculation. It also covers only the seven published rows: St Teresa's suppressed row is not in it, and neither is any student DfE could not match to a GCSE record. It describes 182 students as a group. It says nothing about which department is better, and it is not a measure of teaching: it is what these students achieved against others who started in the same place, for the 2024/25 results.

What Can a Tutor Change About A-Level Physics 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 board sets the papers, so past papers and mark schemes should come from the student's own board, which in the borough may be AQA, Edexcel or OCR. The maths is the second: the specification puts at least 40% of the marks on Level 2 mathematics, so a student admitted on a 5 or a 6 is examined on the same mathematics as one admitted on a 9, because the share belongs to the specification and not to the school.

What no tutor can supply is the practical endorsement, which only the student's own school can assess; our A-level Physics page covers how it works. Students working with us across the borough may also find our Guildford tuition overview useful.

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