A Level Maths Tutors in Leeds

Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College recorded 328 A-level Mathematics exam entries in 2024/25, the largest of the three Leeds institutions compared here, and an average of 36.83 points per A-level entry across all its subjects, against Allerton High School’s 40.16 a few miles away in north Leeds. Leading Tuition provides one-to-one A-level maths tuition for students at sixth forms and colleges across Leeds.

That gap is what a family choosing an A-level maths tutor in Leeds actually needs to know, not a Leeds-wide average that sits below both ends of it. One thing has to be clear before any of it: DfE publishes no average result for individual subjects, so every point score, progress score and retention figure on this page covers all of an institution’s A-level subjects, not maths alone. For maths, DfE publishes an entry count and a separate achievement measure — the share of a cohort gaining an advanced-level maths qualification — but no average grade. This page uses all three — the subject entry and achievement figures to show how large and how successful each institution’s maths teaching actually is, the institution-wide scores to show how its A-level students perform overall — and then explains what the difference in DfE’s own progress-score banding means for a student in the middle of it.

Leeds City Council’s area runs from inner-city wards such as Beeston and Harehills to the leafier suburbs of Alwoodley, Adel and Wetherby. The post-16 landscape looks different from the GCSE-age one covered on our Leeds GCSE maths tutors page: sixth form colleges sit alongside school sixth forms. The three institutions compared below were picked because DfE’s 2024/25 subject data records the largest A-level Mathematics entry numbers of the Leeds institutions we checked — 328, 75 and 62 entries — not because any source ranks them.

Why a Leeds-wide average understates every sixth form named here

DfE’s 2024/25 16-18 performance tables let a family compare named Leeds sixth forms and colleges directly, rather than relying on a single Leeds-wide figure. Three institutions with large A-level Mathematics entry numbers illustrate how wide that internal gap actually is: Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College in central Leeds, Roundhay School in north Leeds, and Allerton High School, also in north Leeds.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, individual 16-18 records for Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College, Roundhay School and Allerton High School, 2024/25 academic year.

Allerton’s 40.16-point average, taken across every A-level subject it enters, is not just higher than Notre Dame’s or Roundhay’s — it is the only one of the three that DfE’s own progress-score model rates ABOVE AVERAGE rather than AVERAGE, meaning Allerton’s A-level students achieved results further above what pupils with their prior attainment typically achieve nationally, not just a higher raw score. Notre Dame’s progress score of 0.01 and Roundhay’s -0.02 both sit inside DfE’s ‘average’ banding, where the statistical confidence interval around the score still includes zero. A raw point-score comparison alone would rank Roundhay above Notre Dame; the progress-score banding, which controls for each cohort’s own prior attainment, does not distinguish between the two at all.

Notre Dame’s 328 A-level Maths entries in a single year are the largest of the three, against 75 at Roundhay and 62 at Allerton, and DfE records them against a college with 974 A-level students in total. What DfE does not publish is how any of those entries were taught: there are no class sizes and no set structures in this data. So the figure tells a family how large an institution’s maths operation is, not what a particular classroom is like — which is why the specific class and teacher a student is placed with matters as much as the college’s overall average.

DfE also publishes a maths-specific achievement measure for each institution, ‘Achieving advanced level maths qualifications’ (DfE measure ks5026): the percentage of a college’s cohort who gained an advanced-level qualification in maths, not an average grade or point score. It is the only maths-specific figure on this page that varies between all three named institutions rather than reporting the same all-subject number. Notre Dame’s 27.4% sits level with the Leeds local authority average of 27.4% and below England’s 30.0%; Roundhay’s 33.7% and Allerton’s 37.2% both clear the England figure, with Allerton highest — the same order as the all-subject point score above.

How do Leeds’s A-level results compare with the England average?

Leeds’s state-funded schools and colleges averaged a B- grade and 35 points per A-level entry in 2024/25, against an England-wide average of 36.1 points, also a B-. Both figures cover every A-level entered: DfE says the measure spans subjects “including English, maths, sciences, languages and humanities”, so it describes an area’s A-level provision as a whole rather than its maths teaching. On the wider academic-qualifications measure, which DfE says includes A-levels alongside other level 3 academic qualifications such as International Baccalaureates and Pre-U, Leeds’s state-funded average falls further behind, at 34.88 points (a C+) against England’s 36.25 (a B-). Leeds also retained fewer students to the end of their main A-level course than England’s state-funded schools and colleges: 91.8% against 93.1%.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, 2024/25 academic year (published April 2026), Leeds local authority and England reference columns.

Set against those two reference points, all three named institutions clear both: Notre Dame’s 36.83, Roundhay’s 37.48 and Allerton’s 40.16 each sit above the 35-point Leeds average and above the 36.1-point England average, with Allerton clearing England by the widest margin of the three. The Leeds-wide figure sits below every one of them, so for a family at any of these three institutions the city average understates what their own sixth form’s A-level students actually achieved. A Leeds-wide figure on its own tells a family less than the name of the college or sixth form their own child attends.

Retention tells a similar story. All three named institutions kept a higher share of their A-level students to the end of their main course than the Leeds or England averages — between 94.1% and 96.3%, against 91.8% for Leeds state-funded institutions as a whole and 93.1% for England’s state-funded institutions. DfE bases the measure on whether a student completed the learning activities for the ‘core aim’ of their study programme, which for these students was an A level, so the difference between a named institution’s figure and the Leeds average is a real difference in how many students finished what they started, not a rounding artefact.

How Further Maths entry numbers differ across three Leeds sixth forms

Further Mathematics availability varies sharply between the three institutions, and DfE’s subject table counts exam entries rather than students. Notre Dame recorded 31 A-level Further Mathematics entries and a further 39 AS Further Mathematics entries in 2024/25 — 70 entries across the two levels, more than the 62 A-level Mathematics entries Allerton records in the subject itself. Roundhay recorded 16 A-level Further Mathematics entries and 8 AS Further Mathematics entries, plus 12 Core Maths entries, a separate Level 3 qualification for students who want to keep some mathematics without a full A-level. Allerton recorded 9 A-level Further Mathematics entries and no AS Further Mathematics entries at all — DfE’s subject list for Allerton publishes entry counts as low as 1, so an absent row is a genuine nil rather than a suppressed small number.

That spread — 9 entries at one institution, 70 at another — is the practical difference between a school that can run Further Maths at all and a college running it at scale. DfE publishes entry counts and nothing about class sizes or teaching sets, so the figures do not say how either institution grouped its students; that is a question worth asking the school directly, because it is what decides how quickly a class can move and how much individual attention a student gets inside timetabled lessons.

Does it matter which exam board my child's Leeds sixth form uses?

Not for content. The Department for Education fixes the subject content for A-level Mathematics itself, so AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and OCR’s MEI-endorsed specification all teach the same topics; the boards differ only in how they structure their papers. We cover the full paper-by-paper breakdown, exam board by exam board, on our dedicated A-level maths page — what matters for a Leeds family is knowing which specification their own sixth form has entered them for before revision starts.

Is A-level maths the hardest A-level?

Ofqual, the exams regulator, does not rank subjects by difficulty. Its grade boundaries are set every year under what it calls the ‘comparable outcomes’ principle: if the national cohort taking a subject is similar in prior attainment to the previous year’s cohort, that subject’s results are calibrated to come out similarly too, whatever the raw marks look like. That is precisely why the progress-score banding above is a more meaningful comparison than a raw point score: DfE’s progress measure already accounts for each college’s own students’ starting point, in a way a single subject’s grade boundary cannot on its own. A reputation for difficulty is not the same as an officially measured difference — Allerton’s ABOVE AVERAGE banding, measured across all the A-level subjects its students entered, is a measured one; ‘A-level maths is the hardest A-level’ is not a claim Ofqual or DfE makes about any subject.

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The free A-level maths tutoring scheme run by the University of Leeds

One genuinely free option is open to Leeds families. The University of Leeds’s Quantum Group runs a free weekly tutoring scheme in A-level Maths, Further Maths and Physics; the group says the scheme is run by student and academic volunteers, and that all its volunteers are currently ‘PhD students and junior academics in the Physics Department at the University of Leeds’. “We offer free tutoring in A-level Maths and Physics to ambitious students of all ability levels at state-funded schools, who feel they could benefit from additional support to their learning, but may not have the means to access it,” the scheme states.

The scheme is open only to Years 12 and 13 students at state-funded schools “across the wider Leeds area”, meaning a student needs to be able to travel to the university’s Sir William Henry Bragg Building regularly for a single after-school session each week. The scheme specifies that session runs “during university term time”, so a family should check its dates against their own school calendar rather than assuming they match. The group says it aims to keep a ratio of four students to each tutor, and runs no lesson plan: it describes “clinic-style” sessions where students bring along something they want to work on, such as a stats and mechanics practice paper.

Those limits are why the scheme and a private tutor solve different problems rather than competing for the same family: it covers only Years 12-13 and only Maths, Further Maths and Physics; it runs once a week in university term time, in a group aiming at four students per tutor rather than one-to-one; and a student at a school outside reasonable travelling distance of the university is not eligible at all. A free, capacity-limited group scheme and a paid one-to-one tutor answer different needs.

How Leading Tuition works with Leeds's A-level maths spread

None of this spread is fixed by which sixth form a student happens to attend. A student at a sixth form averaging below the 35-point Leeds figure is not destined to stay there, and a student at Allerton, averaging 40.16 across its A-level subjects, still needs the specific grade their next step — a Russell Group offer, a STEP or TMUA-conditional course, a resit — actually requires. Our A-level maths tutors work with students across Leeds, from Notre Dame’s 328 A-level Maths entries to smaller classes at schools with only a handful of A-level mathematicians in a year group, starting from whichever exam board and paper structure a student’s own sixth form has entered them for.

For a student who took Core Maths rather than the full A-level, or who is deciding between continuing with Further Maths or dropping to a single Maths A-level after Year 12, the right next step depends on where they actually are against the specific units their board has not yet examined, not on a Leeds-wide average. Families with a younger child also facing 13+ entry can see our 13+ tuition in Leeds page, and families further along at GCSE can see our GCSE maths tutors in Leeds page. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades.

A smaller share of entries at these institutions is for AS-level Mathematics or AS Further Mathematics rather than the full A-level — 2 AS Maths and 8 AS Further Maths entries at Roundhay, and 39 AS Further Maths entries at Notre Dame, the largest AS figure of the three. AS is a standalone qualification usually taken as a one-year course, and it lets a student keep a second mathematics qualification without committing to a second full A-level, which is often the practical choice for a Further Maths student unsure whether to continue into Year 13. Because DfE counts entries rather than people, those 39 AS Further Maths entries at Notre Dame are not necessarily 39 students separate from its 31 A-level Further Maths entries.

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