A Level Maths Tutors in Liverpool

Liverpool's state-funded schools and colleges recorded 663 students completing A level Mathematics in 2024/25, 58.1% of them graded A* to B. The city's state-funded A level average across all subjects, C+ or 34.12 points, sits below the England all-schools figure of B-, or 36.1 points. Average results run from A- at the top Liverpool sixth form to D at the bottom, so where a student studies shapes the outcome more than the citywide figure suggests.

How far apart are Liverpool's post-16 providers?

The Department for Education's 16-18 search returns 48 rows for Liverpool, but those are not 48 institutions. Gateacre School and Archbishop Blanch CofE High School each appear twice, under a predecessor and a successor URN, so the list covers 46 distinct schools and colleges. Of those 46, exactly 29 have a published A level average result for 2024/25, expressed both as a letter grade and as a points score; the rest are special schools and other providers with no A level cohort to report. Across those 29, the distance between the top and the bottom within one city is larger than most parents expect.

The span runs from A- to D. The Blue Coat School averaged A-, or 47.26 points, in 2024/25, the highest average result in the city; the University of Liverpool Mathematics School sits a fraction behind it, also on A-, at 46.49 points. At the other end The Academy of St Nicholas averaged D, or 19.28 points, and Childwall Sports & Science Academy D, or 20.43 points. Between the two extremes sit the providers most Liverpool students actually attend: St Edward's College at C+, or 33.24 points, and The City of Liverpool College at D+, or 23.55 points. All of them sit inside the same local authority, and all of them draw from broadly the same city.

Source: DfE Compare School and College Performance, 16 to 18 advanced level qualifications and subjects entered, 2024/25, read 27 August 2026. Five of Liverpool's 29 providers with published figures, chosen to show the top, the bottom and the middle. Average result and progress are all-subject A level measures: DfE publishes no per-subject grade for an individual school. The maths column counts exam entries. DfE's England comparator changes scope between measures — all schools and colleges for the average result, state-funded only for retention — so the two figures in that row are not on the same base.

The progress score in that table is the DfE's 16 to 18 measure, which compares the grades students actually achieved against what students with similar GCSE results achieved nationally. It is a different measure from the one published at key stage 4, and it is calculated across all of a student's A levels rather than for maths alone. A score above zero means students did better than their prior attainment predicted.

Read together, the columns say something a single ranking would hide. St Edward's College sits almost exactly on the national expectation, at -0.04, while its average grade is below the England figure — which is what a progress measure is for: it separates the intake from the teaching. The City of Liverpool College is below average on both, at -0.47, and retains 83.3% of its students to the end of their course against a Liverpool average of 93.3%. That is low, but it is not the lowest: across the 28 Liverpool providers with a published retention figure the range runs from 56.0% at Gateacre School, which closed on 30 November 2024, up to 100.0% at five providers including The Blue Coat School.

Further maths in Liverpool is taught at 15 schools out of 46

The sharpest fact in Liverpool's post-16 maths data is not about grades at all. It is about where the subject is taught.

Across the whole local authority, 131 students completed A level Further Mathematics in 2024/25, up from 89 in 2022/23 and a shade below the 133 recorded in 2023/24. Read across every Liverpool provider's published subjects list, those entries sit at just 15 institutions out of 46, and the 15 sum to exactly 131. Two schools carry more than half of them. The University of Liverpool Mathematics School entered 44 at A level and one more at AS level, against 48 entries for Mathematics — so very nearly every one of its maths entries is matched by a further maths one. The Blue Coat School, which enters the city's largest maths entry count at 136, entered 31 at A level and two at AS. Between them those two schools account for 75 of the city's 131.

Below the top two the cohorts are small: Calderstones School and King David High School on 8 each, Liverpool College on 7, North Liverpool Academy and St Edward's College on 5 each, and eight further schools on 4 entries or fewer. St Edward's College's 5 sit against 41 Mathematics entries. The City of Liverpool College's published subjects list records no Further Mathematics entries at all, against 19 A level and 6 AS level Mathematics entries. So the subject is not concentrated in one place, but it is thin nearly everywhere: outside two schools, no Liverpool provider runs a further maths group larger than eight.

Two cautions belong with those numbers, and both matter if you intend to check them.

The first is that the 131 figure and the school-level counts come from different DfE collections. The 131 is drawn from the Explore Education Statistics 16-18 results dataset, which counts students at state-funded schools and colleges reaching the end of 16-18 study with a result in that subject. The 44, the 31, the 5 and the 19 come from the Compare School and College Performance subjects-entered tables, whose column is headed "Number of exam entries". They are close cousins, not the same measure, and for the single maths A level they do not reconcile: the same school lists sum to 667 exam entries against 663 students in the local-authority table. For further maths in Liverpool in 2024/25 they happen to agree exactly, at 131 either way, which is why the school-by-school split can be read against the city total here and should not be assumed to work elsewhere.

The second concerns the absence at The City of Liverpool College. The subject does not appear anywhere on that college's published subjects list, which runs from Animal Husbandry (Specific Animals) through every qualification the college enters students for. Alphabetically, Further Mathematics would sit between the Mathematics rows and Mechanical Engineering, and nothing is printed there. DfE's own notes on that page state that data is suppressed "usually when there are 5 or fewer pupils or students covered by the measure", so a blank can mean a small cohort rather than none. In this case the same table prints single-entry rows without suppressing them — Geography 1 at AS level, German 1 at A level, History 1 at AS level — and the same collection prints St Edward's College's 5 Further Mathematics entries, which suggests no suppression is being applied to it. Even so, the honest statement is the one the data supports: no Further Mathematics entries are reported, rather than a confirmed nil return.

For a student who wants to keep engineering, physics or mathematics open at university, this is the practical consequence: further maths availability in Liverpool depends heavily on the sixth form, and a student whose college does not run it needs the subject supported from outside. That is a common reason families look for A level further maths tuition, and it is a different problem from needing help with the single maths A level.

Why Liverpool's further maths grades beat its maths grades

Further Mathematics is the harder qualification, yet in Liverpool it produces a much higher proportion of top grades. The two tables below give the published student counts and band percentages for each subject across three years. The combined A*-B column is derived from the counts, not from the rounded percentages: each cell shows the division in full, so adding the three printed percentages instead will land within a tenth of a point of it rather than exactly on it.

Source: DfE Explore Education Statistics, "Student counts and Results - A level by region and subject (end of 16-18 study)", Liverpool local authority, all state-funded schools and colleges, read 27 August 2026. The figures count students completing 16-18 study with a result in the subject, not exam entries. The combined column is derived, not published: it is the sum of the three published A*, A and B student counts over the published total, shown in full in each cell.

Source: as above, Mathematics (Further), same dataset, same scope and the same derivation.

Roughly three-quarters of Liverpool's further maths results sit in the top three grades, against a little under three-fifths for maths. The explanation is selection rather than difficulty. Almost nobody arrives at further maths by accident: it is taken alongside the single maths A level, usually by students who were already strong at GCSE and whose sixth form judged them ready for a fourth subject. The cohort is filtered before the course begins, which is why comparing the two headline rates tells you about who takes each subject rather than which is harder.

The movement inside the further maths bands is more interesting than the total. The A* share rose from 18.0% in 2022/23 to 26.3% and then 34.4%, while the A share fell from 40.4% to 28.6% and then 26.0%, and the B share went 18.0%, then 19.5%, then 14.5%. The combined figure barely moved — 76.4%, 74.4%, 74.8% — but its composition changed a great deal. In headcount the shift is starker than the shares suggest: A* awards went from 16 to 45 on a cohort that grew from 89 to 131, while the A and B bands together held almost still, at 52 students in 2022/23 and 53 in 2024/25. Roughly seven in ten of the extra further maths places Liverpool has added since 2022/23 have come out at the top grade.

That matters for anyone using an A* offer as a planning assumption. On the single maths A level the top band has been much flatter, at 14.5%, 14.1% and 15.5% across the same three years — a rise of one percentage point, against a further maths A* share that has almost doubled. In headcount the maths A* has kept pace with its cohort rather than lagging it: 79 awards on 544 students, then 95 on 672, then 103 on 663. A student who needs an A* in maths is competing on roughly the odds their predecessors faced; a student who needs one in further maths is looking at a band that has grown much faster than the cohort taking it.

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The maths cohort grew, then levelled off, and not everyone finishes

Liverpool's A level maths cohort is much larger than it was three years ago, but the growth has stopped. Student numbers went from 544 in 2022/23 to 672 in 2023/24, then fell back to 663 in 2024/25. Further maths followed the same shape at a smaller scale: 89, then 133, then 131 — also down in the latest published year. Nationally the average point score per A level entry moved from 35.55 in 2023/24 to 36.09 in 2024/25; that is the same England all-subject figure the comparison table above carries, rounded there to 36.1. So the wider picture is one of slightly rising outcomes on a cohort that has stopped growing, rather than falling standards.

Completion is the number that gets least attention and matters most to a family deciding whether to bring in support in Year 12 rather than Year 13. DfE publishes the percentage of students retained to the end of their main course of study. Liverpool's average is 93.3% and the England state-funded average 93.1%, so the city as a whole is unremarkable. The institutional figures are not. St Edward's College retained 96.6% and the University of Liverpool Mathematics School 94.1%, while The City of Liverpool College retained 83.3% — close to one student in six not completing.

That measure covers whole study programmes rather than individual subjects, so it is not a maths dropout rate, and DfE publishes no subject-level equivalent. What it does show is how far the risk of not finishing depends on where a student is enrolled: 83.3% at one Liverpool college against 96.6% at one sixth form and 100.0% at five providers, in the same city and the same year. If a student is finding Year 12 hard, the decision point arrives early, and it is far easier to address in the autumn of Year 12 than in the spring of Year 13. Families who worked with us at GCSE maths in Liverpool often return at exactly that point.

What the University of Liverpool Mathematics School's own 2026 results add

Everything above is drawn from the DfE's 2024/25 datasets, which are the most recent official figures. One Liverpool institution has since published its own results for the following year, and because it is the city's largest single source of further maths entries it is worth reading separately.

The University of Liverpool Mathematics School reported that its 54 students in the summer 2026 cohort achieved A* or A in 81% of Mathematics entries and grades A* to B in 96% of them, with 53% of Further Mathematics entries awarded A* or A. Those are the school's own published figures for the 2025/26 year, not DfE data, and they are not directly comparable with the local-authority tables above, which cover 2024/25 and every state-funded provider in the city. The further maths figure shows why: 53% A* or A at one school in 2025/26 sits below the 60.3% the whole city recorded in 2024/25 (79 of 131 further maths students awarded A* or A), which is a different year, a different cohort and a far smaller one, not a ranking.

The school is one of eight 16-19 Specialist Mathematics Schools in England. It opened in September 2020, was rated Outstanding by Ofsted in 2024, and was named Sunday Times and Times Sixth Form College of the Year for 2026. Its curriculum is narrow by design, but not to a single subject. The school describes its students as studying Physics and Computer Science alongside Mathematics and Further Mathematics, and its 2024/25 subjects-entered list bears that out: 48 Mathematics and 44 Further Mathematics A level entries, 37 in Physics and 22 in Computer Studies or Computing, from a roll of 51 students enrolled to study mainly A levels.

The reason to state all of this plainly is that the city average is a poor description of any individual provider, and it is worth being precise about why. The school is small: 51 students enrolled to study mainly A levels, against roughly 1,600 across the 29 Liverpool providers with published figures, so it moves the citywide number far less than its results might suggest. The Blue Coat School carries more than three times the weight in that average, at 176 A level students, and a higher average result. A parent comparing a mainstream Liverpool sixth form against the city figure should know that the figure is built mostly from schools that look nothing like either of them.

How Leading Tuition works with Liverpool A level maths students

Our expert A level maths tutors help students across Liverpool with both the pure and applied halves of the qualification, from the algebraic foundations of the first term through to mechanics, statistics and the full further maths core. Teaching is one to one, so the starting point is the student's own position rather than a class average.

In practice, the first session is diagnostic. A student at a sixth form with a strong record in the subject usually needs depth and pace — harder problems, unfamiliar question framing, the step from method to proof. A student whose college has a weaker record, or who is carrying gaps from GCSE, usually needs the foundations rebuilt before anything else will hold. Both are common in Liverpool, and the published data above is a large part of why: the same city contains providers averaging A- and providers averaging D.

Where a student's sixth form does not offer Further Mathematics, we teach it as a full course rather than as extension work, because the content is a qualification in its own right and not a harder version of the single A level. Where a student is aiming at a mathematics, engineering, physics or economics degree, we work backwards from the offer they need.

Our wider A level maths tuition pages set out the subject in more detail, and the A level tuition hub covers the other subjects a Liverpool student is likely to be taking alongside it. You can also see everything we run across Liverpool.

Published figures for individual schools and colleges can be checked directly on the DfE's Compare School and College Performance service, which is the source for every institutional figure on this page.

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