GCSE Maths Tutors Kingston upon Thames: School or Pupil?

Leading Tuition's GCSE maths tutors in Kingston upon Thames start from the pupil rather than the school, because in DfE's provisional summer 2026 data a pupil's school accounts for only 9.5% of the variation in grades across the borough's nine non-selective state secondaries. The remaining 90.5% lies between pupils in the same school. That describes results, not teaching quality: DfE's figures cannot separate a school's intake from what it teaches.

What grades did Kingston's pupils get in GCSE maths in summer 2026?

The table sets out every grade DfE published for GCSE (9-1) Mathematics at Kingston's eleven mainstream state secondaries, in the provisional 2025/26 release published on 15 October 2026. Schools are sorted by number of entries, not by results. "Pupils" is DfE's count of the cohort at the end of Key Stage 4, typically pupils who start the academic year aged 15; 1,967 entries against 1,977 pupils means almost every pupil was entered.

Source: Department for Education, Key stage 4 performance 2025/26 (provisional), data set "Subject school level exam data" version 2.0, GCSE (9-1) Full Course Mathematics, number of entries at grade and number of pupils at the end of KS4; queried through the DfE API on 17 and 24 October 2026. Schools with fewer than 100 entries are excluded and listed below.

Read along a row. At Tiffin School all 180 entries are a grade 6 or above (124 nines, 49 eights, 5 sevens, 2 sixes). At The Tiffin Girls' School all 177 are as well (103, 56, 16 and 2). At each of the nine other schools every grade from 9 to 1 has at least one pupil in it: the fewest grade 9s are the 3 at Southborough High School and the 3 at Chessington School, and the fewest grade 1s are the single pupil at each of Coombe Boys' School, Richard Challoner School and The Holy Cross School.

Our tutors start from that spread: a pupil who says they are at Chessington School has told us which school, but not whether the first job is the grade 4 line or the step from 7 to 8, so the first session begins with the pupil's last mock paper and tier.

Does the school a child attends decide their maths grade?

Among the nine non-selective state secondaries, a school accounts for 9.5% of the variation in pupils' maths grades. The method: score each grade as a number (9 for a grade 9 down to 1 for a grade 1, 0 for U, and leave out the 5 X entries), then split the total variation into the part that separates one school's average from another's and the part that separates pupils within a school. Across the 1,605 scored entries the total is 4.65, of which 0.44 is between schools and 4.21 is within them.

That is a statement about one cohort's results, not a verdict on any school's teaching. DfE has published no progress measure for these pupils, so each school's intake and its teaching are folded together inside the 9.5%. The figure measures how far schools differ from one another in average grade; an effect that every school shared would not appear in it, and it cannot say how much any school helped any pupil.

The figure holds under other choices. Counting X as 0 gives 9.4%, dropping U gives 10.1%, and scoring by rank gives 9.6%. Resampling the pupils within each school 5,000 times puts the 95% interval at 7.4% to 12.6%, while shuffling the same pupils across the nine schools at random gives 0.5% on average. The gap between schools is real, but it is small beside the gap between pupils.

Add the two selective schools and the share rises to 31.8% (29.8% to 34.5% on the same resampling), because those two schools hold 227 of the borough's 400 grade 9s.

Our tutors treat the school as context (which exam board, which tier, which teacher's homework) and the pupil's own mock marks as the measurement, because that is where about nine-tenths of the variation sits.

How far apart are Kingston's schools in practice?

Even the two non-selective schools furthest apart overlap. Chessington School has the lowest average of the nine (4.3 grade points) and The Kingston Academy the highest (6.7). Pick one pupil from each at random: the Chessington pupil has the higher grade 13.7% of the time and the same grade 9.7% of the time. Across all 36 pairs of the nine schools, the pupil from the school with the lower average has the higher grade 31.7% of the time on average, with a range from 13.7% to 43.1%.

A parent comparing two schools in this borough is therefore comparing two overlapping crowds, and the school average says little about where one particular child will land inside either of them. Our tutors work on the child's own distance from the next grade boundary, and ask the school for the tier and the mock mark that show it.

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Which Kingston schools are in these figures, and which are left out?

DfE publishes GCSE (9-1) Mathematics rows for 14 schools registered in the local authority of Kingston upon Thames (DfE code 314, ONS code E09000021). Each school is counted under the authority it is registered with, so the figures cover schools with postal addresses in Kingston upon Thames, Surbiton, New Malden and Chessington, and leave out any Kingston child who attends a school registered elsewhere.

This page keeps the schools with at least 100 entries and compares nothing below that. At 100 entries one pupil moves a school's share of any grade by at most one percentage point; the smallest school kept has 118 entries, and no Kingston school lies between 18 and 117 entries, so any floor in that range keeps the same eleven. The cut removes 3 of the 14 schools, which together account for 20 of the borough's 1,987 entries.

• St Philip's School is excluded because its 17 entries are too few for a school's pattern to mean much; it has 31 pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 and is registered with DfE as a special academy.
• Canbury School is excluded because DfE withheld its grade breakdown: it has 1 entry and 14 pupils at the end of Key Stage 4, and is registered as an independent special school.
• Surbiton High School is excluded because DfE withholds the grade breakdown wherever a school has 5 or fewer entries, and its total is 2 maths entries. A small total is not a small school: DfE counts 185 pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 at Surbiton High School, an independent selective school whose own post of 8 February 2018 says IGCSEs were chosen for Maths, and DfE's methodology says International GCSEs no longer count in school-level performance measures.

Kingston Grammar School is in a different position. DfE's file lists 116 pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 at the school but no GCSE (9-1) Mathematics row at all, only a Level 3 free-standing Mathematics (Additional) qualification. The school's own curriculum page lists Mathematics as an IGCSE core subject.

The figures are provisional. DfE published them on 15 October 2026, describes the data as provisional, and lists the next release for February 2027. DfE calculated no Progress 8 for these pupils, and this page does not rank schools: raw grade counts mix a school's intake with its teaching.

Our tutors use the gaps as a reason to ask first and not assume: Kingston Grammar School's own curriculum page lists Mathematics as an IGCSE, and Surbiton High School's own post of 8 February 2018 said the same, so for a pupil at either school the opening questions are which qualification, which board and which tier: an IGCSE has a different specification and different grade boundaries.

How does GCSE maths tuition work for a Kingston pupil?

Our expert GCSE maths tutors help students across Kingston upon Thames at both Foundation and Higher tier. A programme begins with the pupil's own exam board, tier and latest mock paper, and moves topic by topic through the gaps that cost marks. Sessions run one-to-one online with a shared whiteboard, past-paper questions are marked against the real mark scheme, and parents receive notes after each lesson.

Pupils who finish on a grade 3 must, under DfE's 16 to 19 funding rules, study towards a GCSE after Year 11; our guide to the grade 3 resit rule explains how that works. Pupils going on to A-level can see Kingston's sixth-form figures on our A-level Maths page for Kingston, and the wider subject is covered under maths tutoring.

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