A-Level History Tutors in Liverpool 2026

St Edward’s College, St Hilda’s Church of England High School and The City of Liverpool College are Liverpool’s three largest A-level History providers, each entering exactly 22 students for the subject in 2024/25 out of 260 entries citywide. Despite the identical entry count, the three teach different specifications and produced value-added results for that cohort at opposite ends of DfE’s own scale, with St Hilda’s the only one of the three whose score clears DfE’s significance bar.

Liverpool’s three biggest A-level History providers are tied on entries and teach almost nothing in common

The tie is in Liverpool’s subjects-entered figures, the count of exam entries DfE publishes for each institution and subject. On that measure, three Liverpool sixth forms and colleges entered exactly 22 A-level History students in 2024/25, more than any other provider in the city: St Edward’s College, St Hilda’s Church of England High School and The City of Liverpool College. A different DfE measure, the value-added dataset’s own entry count, counts only students it could match to prior-attainment records and gives a different figure for one of the three — a distinction that matters later on this page and is labelled every time it comes up.

St Edward’s College follows AQA. Its own course page names three components: “The Tudors- England, 1485-1603”, which AQA’s own specification-content page lists as option code 1C; “The American Dream- Reality and Illusion, 1945-1980”, AQA’s option code 2Q; and a 4,000-word Historical Investigation, an independent coursework essay on a historical issue spanning a hundred years, which the school describes as based on “the investigation of a historical issue over a hundred year period”. Entry requires a grade 6 in GCSE History, though the school states it will accept a student without GCSE History if they hold a grade 7 or higher in GCSE English — the only one of the three tied providers that publishes an explicit route in for a student who did not take GCSE History. St Edward’s own exam-boards table also shows the school teaches GCSE History on a different board entirely, Pearson/Edexcel, so a student who joins its sixth form for A-level History moves from Edexcel to AQA at the same school.

St Hilda’s Church of England High School follows Edexcel. Its own sixth-form bridging document sets out four assessed components: Paper 1, “Germany and West Germany, 1918-89”, worth 30% of the A-level over a 2 hour 15 minute exam; Paper 2, “The rise and fall of Fascism in Italy, c.1911-46”, worth 20% over 1 hour 30 minutes; Paper 3, “Rebellion and disorder under the Tudors, 1485-1603”, worth 30%; and an independent-enquiry coursework module worth 20% on the causes of the First World War, with a deadline the school places around January or February of Year 13. Entry needs “a minimum of Grade 5 in GCSE History, if taken”, according to the college’s own entry-requirements table, plus a grade 4 in GCSE English Language.

The City of Liverpool College is the third provider tied at 22 entries, and the one whose specification we could not confirm. Its own course listings name the qualification only as “A Level History”, with no awarding body stated, and a general Liverpool City Region course-finder search that appeared to list the College’s own History course in fact resolved — on inspection of the page itself — to a different institution, St Mary’s Catholic College, in Wallasey, outside Liverpool. Catching that mismatch is also why the rest of this page’s figures can be trusted: every source here was opened and checked against its own URL before being used, and a listing that fails that check is dropped rather than used. The City of Liverpool College does not publish its A-level History exam board anywhere we could find, checked 24 September 2026, and we have not guessed at one.

Same exam board, same first two papers — then Calderstones and St Hilda’s split for Year 2 and coursework

Calderstones School, Liverpool’s fifth-largest A-level History provider with 15 entries in 2024/25, is also on Edexcel — and for the first year of the course it teaches exactly what St Hilda’s does. Calderstones’ own course page lists Paper 1 as “Germany and West Germany, 1918-89”, worth 30% of the A-level, and Paper 2 as “The rise and fall of fascism in Italy, c.1911-46”, worth 20%: the same two papers, the same titles, the same weightings as St Hilda’s.

From Year 2 the two providers stop overlapping entirely. Calderstones’ Paper 3 is “Britain: Gaining and Losing an Empire 1763-1914”, worth 30% of the A-level, and its coursework — a Historical Enquiry worth 20%, 3,000 to 4,000 words — covers Russia, 1894-1924, the reign and fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the rise of Bolshevik rule. St Hilda’s students spend the same proportion of the course on Tudor rebellion, 1485-1603, and write their coursework on the causes of the First World War. A student moving between the two sixth forms after Year 1 would have covered exactly the same two exam papers and then find nothing in common for the remaining half of the course. Calderstones asks for a flat grade 5 in GCSE History for entry, with no separate English-grade alternative stated on its course page — a plainer bar than either St Edward’s two-track requirement or St Hilda’s paired History-and-English condition.

How many of Liverpool’s 30 post-16 providers actually enter A-level History

DfE holds a full 2024/25 subjects-entered record for 30 Liverpool post-16 providers — the same set already established on Leading Tuition’s Liverpool A-level Physics and English pages, matched by URN rather than by name. Of those 30, 25 entered at least one student for A-level History, returning 260 entries between them. Five returned a recorded nil for History while still entering students for other A-level subjects that year, so the absence is a confirmed zero rather than a missing record: Childwall Sports & Science Academy, Dixons Broadgreen Academy, LIPA Sixth Form College, North Liverpool Academy and University of Liverpool Mathematics School.

St Margaret’s Church of England Academy (16 entries) and Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School (15) are the next-largest providers after the tied three, and Liverpool College, St Julie’s Catholic High School and The Belvedere Academy each returned 12. At the other end, seven providers entered five students or fewer, so a citywide total of 260 sits on a distribution with a long tail: History is offered broadly across Liverpool’s post-16 sector but concentrated unevenly, with the three tied-largest providers alone accounting for 66 of the city’s 260 entries (25.4%), a figure we calculated by summing their three entry counts and dividing by the citywide total above.

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Where Liverpool’s DfE value-added data for A-level History clears zero — and where the tied-largest providers land

DfE’s value-added measure compares a school’s A-level History grades against the grades achieved nationally by students who started the course with the same prior attainment — it is a comparison against a national benchmark, not a ranking of one Liverpool provider’s teaching against another’s. Each score comes with its own 95% confidence interval, and DfE’s own guidance treats a score as a real finding only when that interval sits entirely above or entirely below zero; a school whose interval still spans zero cannot be said to differ from the national benchmark at all, whatever the single figure reads.

Of Liverpool’s 25 History-entering institutions, DfE publishes a non-suppressed 2024/25 value-added score for 17; the other 8 are suppressed for small cohorts. Of those 17, exactly 5 clear zero entirely. Three are positive: St Hilda’s Church of England High School at +0.55 (95% CI +0.17 to +0.93, 22 VA-matched entries), The Blue Coat School at +0.52 (CI +0.03 to +1.01, 13 entries) and St Margaret’s Church of England Academy at +0.46 (CI +0.02 to +0.9, 16 entries). Two are negative: Archbishop Beck Catholic College at -0.51 (CI -1 to -0.02, 13 entries) and The City of Liverpool College at -0.99 (CI -1.37 to -0.6, 21 VA-matched entries — one fewer than its 22 subjects-entered total, because DfE could match only 21 of its History entrants to prior-attainment records). The remaining 12 non-suppressed scores all have an interval that still spans zero, including the other two tied-largest providers: St Edward’s College at -0.2 (CI -0.57 to +0.18, 22 entries) and, among the smaller providers, Calderstones School at +0.28 (CI -0.18 to +0.73, 15 entries).

Set against the finding in the first section, the pattern is stark: of the three sixth forms tied on raw numbers, only St Hilda’s — the Edexcel provider — has a value-added score DfE’s own test would call a real finding, and it is the best score of the three. The City of Liverpool College, tied on entries and the provider whose board we could not identify, has the most negative statistically significant History score anywhere in Liverpool. St Edward’s, the AQA provider, sits in between and is not significant either way. Entry numbers and value added measure different things, and this page’s opening tie is a coincidence in one dataset, not a shared result in the other.

How Leading Tuition works with Liverpool A-level History students

Three Liverpool sixth forms tied on the same entry count teach three different courses, so a tutor who starts from a generic History syllabus is starting from the wrong place for at least two of them. Our expert A-level History tutors across Liverpool begin from a student’s own sixth form, board and named options — whether that means AQA’s Tudors-to-American-Dream pairing, Edexcel’s Germany-to-Tudor-rebellion route, or the Empire-and-Russia route Calderstones sets instead — and build source analysis, essay structure and coursework planning around the papers and the topic a student is actually sitting, not a general period they happen to share with a page like this one.

Liverpool’s A-level History cohort sits alongside our coverage of GCSE History in Liverpool, which owns the city’s GCSE picture in full, and the national A-level History guide, which covers grade difficulty, the 2026 national results and how AQA 7042 and Edexcel 9HI0 mark an essay. Board-by-board detail sits on our AQA A-level History and Edexcel A-level History pages. We also support students across Liverpool in A-level English and other sixth-form subjects, and every institutional figure on this page can be checked directly on DfE’s Compare School and College Performance service.

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