DfE 2024/25 figures for every Nottingham city sixth form and college that entered students for A-level chemistry, and how our tutors work with students at each.
Book a Free ConsultationNottingham city is served by thirteen sixth forms and colleges that entered students for A-level Chemistry in 2024/25, and between them they recorded 469 A-level Chemistry entries — 153 of those at Bilborough College alone. Nottingham’s state-funded schools and colleges averaged a C, 31.64 points per entry across all A levels; England’s B- and 36.1 covers all schools and colleges, independent ones included. Leading Tuition works with A-level chemistry students at sixth forms across the city.
Our expert A-level chemistry tutors help students across Nottingham with all three written papers and the required practicals, whichever specification their own sixth form or college has entered them for.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppNottingham the city is local authority 892; Nottinghamshire the county is a separate authority with different schools and different averages. Every figure below is the city.
The Department for Education’s 16-to-18 listing for Nottingham city returns 19 institutions. Six of those — Rosehill School, Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College, Sutherland House School, Oak Field School, Nethergate Academy and The Bulwell Academy — answer with “16 to 18 data is not available for this school or college”. That is not a statement that they entered nobody; it is a statement that DfE publishes nothing for them, which is a different thing and has to be kept separate from it. The remaining thirteen have published subject data, and every single one of them entered students for A-level Chemistry in 2024/25. Between them they recorded 469 entries.
| Nottingham city institution | A-level students | A-level Chemistry entries | A-level Biology entries | Chemistry minus Biology | Average result per entry, all subjects | DfE progress banding |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilborough College | 988 | 153 | 184 | -31 | C+ (33.7) | Below average (-0.1) |
| NUAST | 136 | 72 | 60 | +12 | B- (38.13) | Average (0.03) |
| Nottingham High School | 132 | 49 | 49 | 0 | A (49.75) | Above average (0.28) |
| The Trinity Catholic School | 86 | 36 | 35 | +1 | C+ (33.49) | Average (0.05) |
| Bluecoat Aspley Academy | 148 | 33 | 40 | -7 | C- (27.26) | Below average (-0.25) |
| The Nottingham Emmanuel School | 99 | 29 | 25 | +4 | D+ (23.87) | Below average (-0.54) |
| Nottingham College | 301 | 24 | 40 | -16 | C- (27.27) | Below average (-0.43) |
| Nottingham Girls’ High School | 51 | 24 | 22 | +2 | B+ (44.09) | Average (0.06) |
| Nottingham Academy | 48 | 18 | 19 | -1 | D+ (23.17) | Below average (-0.47) |
| Djanogly City Academy | 43 | 10 | 15 | -5 | C- (26.88) | Average (-0.06) |
| Nottingham Girls’ Academy | 27 | 10 | 10 | 0 | C (28.93) | Below average (-0.42) |
| Nottingham Free School | 31 | 7 | 10 | -3 | C (31.1) | Average (-0.14) |
| Nottingham University Samworth Academy | 16 | 4 | 5 | -1 | D (20) | Well below average (-0.79) |
| Nottingham city (state-funded schools and colleges) | – | – | – | – | C (31.64) | – |
| England (all schools and colleges) | – | – | – | – | B- (36.1) | – |
Source: DfE Compare School and College Performance, 16-to-18 subjects entered and A-level qualification pages for each institution, 2024/25 academic year, read 19 September 2026 on the Department for Education’s Compare School and College Performance service. Every figure is Nottingham CITY (local authority 892); Nottinghamshire county is a separate authority and none of its schools appear in this table. “A-level students” is the number of students the DfE A-level measures for that institution are based on. “Chemistry minus Biology” is our own subtraction of two DfE-published rows. “Average result per entry” and the progress banding are both all-subject 16-to-18 measures, not Chemistry-only ones — DfE publishes no subject-level progress score. The last two rows are the comparison lines DfE prints on each institution’s own page.
The useful comparison is the column beside it. The same thirteen institutions recorded 514 A-level Biology entries, so across Nottingham city Chemistry runs 45 entries behind Biology — the national pattern in miniature. At the level of an individual sixth form it is wrong more often than it is right.
Four of the thirteen enter more students for Chemistry than for Biology: NUAST (72 against 60), The Trinity Catholic School (36 against 35), The Nottingham Emmanuel School (29 against 25) and Nottingham Girls’ High School (24 against 22). Two more are exactly level — Nottingham High School at 49 each and Nottingham Girls’ Academy at 10 each. So in six of thirteen Nottingham city institutions, Chemistry is level with Biology or ahead of it.
The city-wide gap comes from two providers. Bilborough College enters 153 for Chemistry against 184 for Biology, a gap of 31; Nottingham College enters 24 against 40, a gap of 16. Those come to 47 — larger than the 45-entry gap for the whole city. Subtract them and the other eleven institutions are two entries ahead on Chemistry. Both component figures are single DfE rows in the table above, so the arithmetic can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The most useful thing a Nottingham chemist can know before opening a past paper is which specification they are sitting; our national A-level Chemistry guide sets out how the five differ in content and assessment. Locally the question is settled institution by institution — and at Bilborough College, not even at the level of the science faculty.
Bilborough states on its own Chemistry course page: “We follow the OCR-A specification, assessed with six hours of exams at the end of Year 13 and no coursework.” On its Biology page, the same college states: “We follow the AQA Biology specification.” On its Physics page: “We follow the Edexcel (9PH0) Specification which we have chosen as it offers the best exam structure to reward the understanding you will have developed.” Three sciences, three different specifications, one college.
The intuitive assumption — that a school picks a board and applies it across its science department — is simply false here. A student who borrows a friend’s revision guide on the strength of attending the same college can end up on the wrong specification, and a tutor cannot infer a student’s Chemistry specification from their Biology one.
There is a practical trap in finding this out. Bilborough’s Chemistry specification is not in the visible text of its course page: it sits inside a collapsed “Course Structure” panel, and a reader skimming the page, or a tool that extracts only visible text, will come away believing the college names no board for Chemistry. It does. The panel has to be opened.
Nottingham College takes the opposite approach and is explicit about it, recording its qualification as “AQA A Level Chemistry”, taught over two years from its High Pavement Sixth Form site, with AQA named for its Biology and Physics too. NUAST Sixth Form names an exam board on most of its published A-level course profiles — Edexcel for Mathematics, AQA for Physics, OCR for History and Engineering Design among others — but names none on its Chemistry profile, so we have not attributed one to it. A family that needs to know should ask the sixth form directly rather than infer it from a topic list.
Our A-level chemistry tutors teach to your child’s own specification from the first session — OCR A, AQA or another — so the past papers and mark schemes they work from are the ones they will actually sit.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppA-level Chemistry assessment must carry at least 20% level 2 mathematics against 10% for Biology and 40% for Physics — a floor set by the Department for Education, not by a board or a department, and one our national A-level Chemistry guide covers in full. What that floor does to a Nottingham student’s options is decided one sixth form at a time.
NUAST Sixth Form applies the same headline requirement to all three sciences — five grade 6s at GCSE — and then varies what has to sit inside it:
Three sciences, one admissions score, three positions on GCSE maths, in the same order as the national weighting. How far that generalises is worth stating carefully: the 10/20/40 floor is fixed nationally, but whether a provider sets its entry bar to match is its own choice. This is NUAST’s pattern, not a rule that holds everywhere.
Bilborough College points the same way in a quieter fashion. Its Chemistry gate opens with maths: “To study Chemistry at Bilborough, you will need to have a minimum of a grade 6 in GCSE Maths and a 5 in English Language.” The science requirement follows second: “In addition you need to have a 6 in Core and Applied GCSE Double Science or a 6 in Chemistry GCSE if you have studied Triple Science.” Its Biology page states the science requirement first and maths second. The college also rules out a route some students expect to work: “BTEC Science Level 2 and Applied Science is not sufficient.”
For a Year 11 in Nottingham the practical reading is that GCSE maths is part of the Chemistry entry requirement at both of the city’s largest providers, not an afterthought, and that a student who scrapes a 5 in maths has a narrower set of options for Chemistry than for Biology. Our Nottingham GCSE chemistry page covers the stage before that decision.
Most A-level entry requirements are about grades. Nottingham College attaches a different kind of condition to Chemistry, about what else a student is taking: “If you are choosing to study A Level Chemistry and do not wish to study A Level Biology or A Level Physics alongside, you will need to discuss this with a chemistry tutor before enrolling. You can choose any A Level combination, but it is strongly recommended that you take A Level Chemistry alongside another science or maths-based subject.”
The college attaches a comparable condition to Physics, but keyed to a different subject: “If not studying A Level Maths, discussion and approval by a physics tutor will be necessary.” Two sciences, two combination conditions, pointing at different places — Chemistry towards the other sciences, Physics towards mathematics.
On grades, Nottingham College sets a general rule and then a subject rule. The general one: “To study 3 A Levels, including A level Chemistry, you’ll need at least 5 GCSE’s at grades 9-4 including GCSE English at grade 4 or above and Maths at grade 6 or above.” The Chemistry one: “One of your GCSEs must be a Grade 6 or above in GCSE Maths plus Grade 6 or above in GCSE Chemistry. This includes a 6/6 in Combined Science/Science Trilogy.” It then names three qualifications that do not count towards it: “GCSE Applied Science, GCSE Combined Science: Synergy, BTEC Science”.
On assessment the college is brief and specific: “There will be three written papers of two hours duration”, and “students need to complete the practical endorsement which comprises 12 required practicals in the laboratory — students can gain a pass/fail for this.” The endorsement is worth understanding but it is not a Chemistry differentiator: practical work carries the same weight across all three sciences, and our Nottingham A-level biology page sets out how the pass/fail endorsement works in full. The mathematics is where Chemistry genuinely diverges.
Our A-level chemistry tutors treat the quantitative 20% as a skill in its own right — moles, equilibrium constants, pH and free energy — rather than assuming a student who understands the chemistry can already do the arithmetic under time pressure.
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DfE publishes a third 16-to-18 measure that sixth forms quote in their marketing: the percentage of students “achieving AAB or higher, including at least 2 facilitating subjects”. Parents meet it often and are rarely told which subjects it counts.
It is answerable exactly. DfE publishes a workbook of every qualification counting in the 16-to-19 performance tables, and one of its columns is headed “A level in facilitating subject?”. The full A level in Chemistry is flagged “Yes” on every specification available in England — AQA, OCR Chemistry A, OCR Chemistry B (Salters), Pearson Edexcel and WJEC Eduqas. So Chemistry counts, whichever of Nottingham’s providers a student attends.
Three things do not count, and they catch people out. AS-level Chemistry is flagged “No” on every board. So are International Baccalaureate Chemistry at both Higher and Standard Level, and the Pre-U Chemistry Principal. The measure is a full A-level measure, and DfE’s technical guidance is explicit that “a student must have achieved three A levels, of which at least two are in facilitating subjects, at grades AAB or better”.
Across Nottingham city the published figures vary more than almost any other measure on this page. Nottingham High School records 65.4%, Nottingham Girls’ High School 39.2% and NUAST 33.6%. Bilborough College records 18.1% from much the largest measured group, 651 students. The Trinity Catholic School records 17.6%, The Nottingham Emmanuel School 10.7%, Nottingham Free School 9.7%, Bluecoat Aspley Academy 7.4% and Nottingham College 5.0%. Three institutions record 0.0%: Nottingham Academy, Djanogly City Academy and Nottingham Girls’ Academy. The comparison lines DfE prints alongside are 15.4% for Nottingham city and 17.5% for England.
One institution is missing from that list on purpose. Nottingham University Samworth Academy’s figure is suppressed rather than published, because DfE withholds a measure covering five or fewer students. A suppressed figure is not a zero, and treating it as one would invent a result the Department declined to publish.
These are whole-institution figures across every subject, not Chemistry results — a sixth form can post a strong AAB percentage on the back of its mathematicians. What the measure tells a Chemistry student is that their subject counts towards it, and that sitting the AS instead would not.
Entry counts decide what a department can do, and the range across Nottingham city is wide enough to describe two different experiences of the same A level.
At the top, Bilborough College entered 153 students and publishes the only staffing figure any Nottingham provider gives for Chemistry: “Ours is an impressively resourced department, with state-of-the-art laboratories and five teaching staff with a dazzling thirteen degrees between them.” A department that size runs parallel sets and a full enrichment programme — Bilborough names the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge in Year 12 and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry Olympiad, “a two-hour exam which really stretches you beyond the normal requirements of A-level”, in Year 13.
At the other end, Nottingham Free School entered seven students, Djanogly City Academy and Nottingham Girls’ Academy ten each, and Nottingham University Samworth Academy four. Those are single teaching groups. Neither size is better in itself, but they fail differently: a student who misses the week on electrode potentials in a group of four has nobody else working at the same point to catch up alongside, and no second set covering the same material on a different day.
The extremes are set by two institutions of very different kinds. Nottingham College’s 24 entries are 8.0% of its 301 A-level students, the smallest Chemistry share in the city at its second-largest sixth form. NUAST’s 72 come from a cohort of 136, or 52.9%, the largest share in Nottingham city.
Physics marks where viability runs out. The same thirteen institutions entered 264 students for A-level Physics against 469 for Chemistry, and twelve of the thirteen enter it at all — Nottingham University Samworth Academy has no A-level Physics row in 2024/25. Nottingham Free School entered one student for Physics, Djanogly City Academy two. Chemistry is available at workable group sizes in places where Physics already is not, which is part of why it is the science a Nottingham student is most likely to be able to take locally.
Our expert A-level chemistry tutors work one-to-one with Nottingham students in both kinds of department — whether your child is one of 153 at a large college department or one of four in a small school group, the programme is built around the topics they have actually not secured.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppEvery programme starts with the student’s own institution and specification, because this page has shown neither can be assumed. A student at Bilborough College is sitting OCR Chemistry A, one at Nottingham College AQA, and one at NUAST or a smaller school sixth form may be on something else again; we confirm it in the first session rather than guess from a topic list.
From there the planning follows where Chemistry breaks down. The quantitative 20% is the most common place, and it is rarely a gap in chemical understanding: moles and titration arithmetic, equilibrium constants and their units, pH and buffers, entropy and free energy in mixed units. Organic synthesis is the other, rewarding a map rather than a list — which reagent moves which functional group in which direction. Alongside both sits the practical work: twelve required practicals whose pass/fail endorsement is reported separately from the A*–E grade and which need a logbook of competent technique, not exam-style answers.
Students taking Chemistry alongside Biology at Nottingham College are following the combination the college recommends, and we cover the overlapping content explicitly. For students aiming at Medicine, Dentistry or Veterinary Science, where Chemistry is the most commonly required A level of all, sessions cover the admissions context as well as the exam.
Sessions are one-to-one and online, with a shared whiteboard so a tutor can work a past-paper question, mark it against the real mark scheme and leave the annotated version with the student. Parents get a short written note after each session. Across all subjects and levels, 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 59 reviews. Our wider A-level tuition and our other tutoring across Nottingham cover the rest of what we do.
Bilborough College, by a wide margin. DfE data for the 2024/25 academic year records 153 A-level Chemistry entries at Bilborough, against 72 at NUAST and 49 at Nottingham High School. Those three account for 274 of the 469 A-level Chemistry entries recorded across the thirteen Nottingham city institutions with published 16-to-18 data. The remaining ten range from 36 at The Trinity Catholic School down to four at Nottingham University Samworth Academy. Scale is not concentration, though: Chemistry is 15.5% of Bilborough’s 988 A-level students and 52.9% of NUAST’s 136.
Every published Chemistry gate in the city names GCSE maths as well as GCSE science. Bilborough College asks for “a minimum of a grade 6 in GCSE Maths and a 5 in English Language” plus a 6 in Double Science or Chemistry, and rules out BTEC Science Level 2 and Applied Science. Nottingham College asks for “a Grade 6 or above in GCSE Maths plus Grade 6 or above in GCSE Chemistry”, accepting a 6/6 in Combined Science but excluding GCSE Applied Science, Combined Science: Synergy and BTEC Science. NUAST Sixth Form asks for five grade 6s “which must include a grade 6 in chemistry and Maths or a 6:6 in combined science”. Smaller school sixth forms publish their own figures.
It varies by institution, and at one college it varies by subject within the same science faculty. Bilborough College states “we follow the OCR-A specification” for Chemistry, while following AQA for Biology and Edexcel 9PH0 for Physics. Nottingham College records its qualification as “AQA A Level Chemistry”. NUAST Sixth Form names exam boards on most of its A-level course profiles but names none on its Chemistry profile, so we have not attributed one to it — ask the sixth form directly. Note that Bilborough’s specification is inside a collapsed panel on its course page rather than in the visible text, so it is easy to miss.
Yes, on every specification. DfE’s workbook of qualifications counting in the 16-to-19 performance tables carries a column headed “A level in facilitating subject?”, and the full A level in Chemistry is flagged “Yes” for AQA, OCR Chemistry A, OCR Chemistry B (Salters), Pearson Edexcel and WJEC Eduqas. AS-level Chemistry is flagged “No”, as are International Baccalaureate Chemistry at Higher and Standard Level and the Pre-U Chemistry Principal. The measure counts students achieving AAB or better across three A levels with at least two in facilitating subjects, so it is a full A-level measure throughout.
Across Nottingham city as a whole, Biology: 514 entries against 469 for Chemistry in 2024/25, over the same thirteen institutions. But that gap is produced by two providers — Bilborough College enters 31 more for Biology and Nottingham College 16 more, together exceeding the 45-entry city gap, so across the other eleven institutions Chemistry is two entries ahead. Four enter more for Chemistry than Biology and two are exactly level.
Thirteen. The DfE 16-to-18 listing for Nottingham city, local authority 892, returns 19 institutions, but six of them — Rosehill School, Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College, Sutherland House School, Oak Field School, Nethergate Academy and The Bulwell Academy — return “16 to 18 data is not available for this school or college”. That means DfE publishes nothing for them, not that they entered nobody, and the two are worth keeping apart. All thirteen institutions that do have published 16-to-18 subject data entered students for A-level Chemistry.
Tell us which sixth form or college your child attends and which specification they sit, and our expert A-level chemistry tutors will build a programme around the quantitative work, the organic synthesis and the practical logbook they have not yet secured.
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