A-Level English Tutors in Nottingham 2026

Nottingham has 13 active sixth forms and colleges, and every one enters students for A-level English Literature. Only 8 also enter English Language separately, and only Nottingham College enters the combined English Language and Literature award. Bilborough College, the city’s largest provider, splits its own English department across two boards — WJEC for Language, OCR for Literature — while Nottingham College runs all three English A-levels on AQA.

All 13 of Nottingham’s sixth forms teach English Literature — only one teaches all three English A-levels

The Department for Education lists 14 schools and colleges under Nottingham city’s local authority code, 892. One of them, Hollygirt School, has no sixth form at all — GIAS records its age range as 10 to 16 and its official sixth-form field as “Does not have a sixth form” — so this page treats Nottingham’s active provider set as the remaining 13. DfE’s 2024/25 subject data does still carry a suppressed English Literature row for Hollygirt, while the GIAS record for it, last confirmed on 1 September 2026, gives that 10-to-16 age range: it sits inside the Department’s fourteen, but not among the thirteen a family can apply to today. Every one of those 13 entered students for GCE A-level English Literature in 2024/25. Only 8 entered English Language as a separate A-level, and only Nottingham College entered the combined English Language and Literature award. The 5 that teach Literature alone — Nottingham Academy, Nottingham Girls’ Academy, Nottingham University Samworth Academy, Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology and The Trinity Catholic School — do not appear at all in DfE’s English Language rows for 2024/25.

A family who assumes “A-level English” means one course, chosen once, will be right at some Nottingham sixth forms and wrong at others. At Bilborough College and Nottingham College a student chooses between Language, Literature or (at Nottingham College only) the combined award; at five smaller providers, Literature is the only English A-level on offer at all. This three-way split is specific to A-level: at GCSE, our Nottingham GCSE English page covers why English Language and English Literature are two separate GCSEs, which is a different question from the one this page answers. The table below sets out what DfE’s 2024/25 data records for each of Nottingham’s 13 active providers.

Source: DfE subject value-added data set 019c2960-abc0-700e-91ed-bb9823c0feed, 2024/25 academic year, queried 24 September 2026. “Suppressed” means DfE withheld the figure for a small cohort, not that the institution entered nobody. — entries are the count of students DfE could match to prior attainment for the value-added calculation, not necessarily every student who sat the exam.

Why Bilborough College’s own English department sits on two different boards

Bilborough College enters more Nottingham students for A-level English than any other provider — 114 for Literature, 46 for Language — and its own course pages state plainly that the two A-levels are not on the same board. For English Language: “At Bilborough we study with the WJEC board for a two year course with final external examinations at the end of the second year.” For English Literature: “The exam board is OCR”, specification H472. One department, two boards, because English Language and English Literature are two separate qualifications that happen to share a subject name.

“WJEC” is not, on its own, a complete answer to which qualification a Bilborough student actually sits. WJEC’s own site lists its own A-level English Language as Qual Code 1700QS (QN 601/5390/8) — a specification it regulates for centres in Wales. The England-regulated version of the same specification family is branded Eduqas, carries a different code, A700QS (QN 601/5043/9), and is listed on Eduqas’s own site rather than WJEC’s. WJEC’s own page even links “Teach in England?” straight through to eduqas.co.uk. Bilborough is an English institution, so our own reading is that its cohort sits the Eduqas-regulated version — that is our inference from WJEC’s own routing, not a statement WJEC or Bilborough has made about Bilborough by name, since Bilborough’s own copy simply says “WJEC”.

Bilborough’s OCR English Literature course names its texts and weighting directly. Component 1, Drama and Poetry Pre-1900, covers Shakespeare’s Othello, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Christina Rossetti’s poetry, worth 40% of the A-level. Component 2, the Gothic, covers Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, also 40%. Component 3, Literature Post-1900, is 20% coursework: a close analysis of poetry from Malika Booker’s Pepper Seed, and a comparative essay on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman against a novel of the student’s own choice. Entry to either English A-level at Bilborough needs grade 5 or above in both GCSE English Language and GCSE English Literature, plus grade 4 or above in GCSE Maths. For how OCR structures English Literature nationally, see our OCR A-level English Literature guide; for the Eduqas-regulated English Language specification WJEC routes England-based centres to, see our Eduqas A-level English Language guide.

Nottingham College is the city’s only combined-award provider — and runs all three on AQA

Nottingham College teaches its A-levels through High Pavement Sixth Form, on Chaucer Street in the city centre, and its own course pages record all three English A-levels on AQA: English Language is “AQA A Level English Language” (specification 7702), English Literature is “AQA A Level English Literature B” (7717), and the combined award is “AQA A Level English Language and Literature” (7707), confirmed against AQA’s own qualification pages for each code. No other Nottingham provider in this data teaches the combined award, and no other provider we could verify runs all three English A-levels on a single board. See our AQA A-level English Language guide and AQA A-level English Literature guide for how each specification is structured nationally.

The Literature B set texts Nottingham College currently lists split into two components. Aspects of tragedy: John Keats’s ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella or The Pot of Basil’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Shakespeare’s Othello. Elements of crime writing: Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News?, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and unseen crime-fiction extracts. Set texts can change year to year on any specification, so this list is worth confirming directly with the sixth form before buying editions.

AQA’s own page for 7717 currently carries two live editions side by side, not one that has simply been updated: a “Current” edition, with last exams Summer 2026, and an updated edition adding two optional new texts, for first exam 2027. AQA’s own instruction is conditional: “If you are choosing to teach the new texts for first exam in 2027, please refer to the updated specification.” Read plainly, a cohort not moving to the new optional texts stays on the Current edition through Summer 2026; only a school opting into the new texts follows the 2027 edition. Nottingham College’s own page names the specification simply as 7717 without stating which edition its current Year 13 cohort follows.

Nottingham College’s general A-level entry requirement, stated identically across all three of its English course pages, is at least 5 GCSEs at grades 9-4 including GCSE English Language at grade 5 or above and Maths at grade 4 or above, for a three-A-level programme (6 GCSEs at grades 9-6 for four A-levels). That is a college-wide rule rather than an English-specific one, and it sits alongside a minimum grade-D progression requirement at the end of Year 1. Our national A-level English Literature guide covers open versus closed-book papers and AQA Literature A against B in full, and our A-level English Language guide compares paper structure board by board — neither is repeated here.

What Nottingham’s academically selective schools publish — and what they don’t

Two of Nottingham’s 13 active providers are independent and academically selective: Nottingham High School and Nottingham Girls’ High School (GDST). Checked on their own sixth-form pages on 24 September 2026, neither publishes an exam board or a set text for A-level English. Nottingham High School’s own pages (nottinghamhigh.co.uk/sixth/a-level-subjects and /sixth/faqs) list English Language and English Literature among its 25 A-level subjects and stop there. Nottingham Girls’ High School’s equivalent detail sits inside a downloadable PDF sixth-form prospectus rather than an HTML page we could read directly; its own public web pages, checked the same day, name no board either.

That is a genuine contrast with the rest of the city, not a gap in our own search. Bilborough College, Nottingham College and Djanogly City Academy all publish their board on an ordinary web page. Djanogly’s own subject overview names AQA for English Literature directly — “AQA’s English Literature course adopts a historicist approach to the study of literature” — though the same page’s English Language section describes the course without naming a board, which we record as an honest gap rather than assume it matches Literature. DfE’s value-added data records entries for both subjects at Djanogly regardless of what its site discloses: English Language 7 entries, English Literature 6.

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DfE’s value-added data: where Nottingham’s English results clear zero, and where they don’t

Two things worth saying plainly before any figure below. First, value added compares a school’s students against students with similar prior attainment nationally — it is not a raw grade average and a negative score is not a simple verdict on a cohort’s results or a school’s teaching; a school can post a negative value-added score while its students still achieve good grades in absolute terms. Second, 9 of the city’s 23 English provider-subject rows are suppressed by DfE for small cohort size, so this table is a partial picture by construction, not a complete one. Every figure below carries its own entry count for exactly that reason.

A value-added figure is only a finding where its confidence interval sits entirely on one side of zero. Of Nottingham’s 14 real-valued rows, 4 clear zero — and all four are negative. Nottingham College’s English Language sits at -0.61 (confidence interval -0.93 to -0.29, 27 entries) and its English Literature at -0.92 (-1.24 to -0.59, 32 entries). Bilborough College’s English Literature sits at -0.20 (-0.37 to -0.03, 114 entries) — the largest cohort of any significant row in this data. The Trinity Catholic School’s English Literature sits at -0.80 (-1.45 to -0.16, 8 entries). No Nottingham provider posts a statistically significant positive value-added score in any A-level English subject in this data.

Source: DfE subject value-added data set 019c2960-abc0-700e-91ed-bb9823c0feed, 2024/25 academic year, queried 24 September 2026. Entries are VA-matched entries (students DfE could match to prior attainment), not the total number who sat the exam. “Significant” means the confidence interval sits entirely above or entirely below zero.

Summed across only the four statistically significant rows — our own addition, shown with both inputs — that is 27 plus 32 plus 114 plus 8, or 181 VA-matched English entries sitting inside a negative confidence interval. That is not the same claim as “181 Nottingham students underperformed in English”: value added is a comparison against similar students nationally, the entries are a matched subset rather than every student who sat the exam, and 9 further rows carry no published figure at all. Treat this table as what DfE has published and verified, not as the complete picture for any single school.

How Leading Tuition works with A-level English students in Nottingham

Sessions are one-to-one and online, built around the specification a student’s own Nottingham sixth form has entered them for — OCR’s Component 3 coursework at Bilborough, AQA Literature B’s Aspects of Tragedy at Nottingham College, or the WJEC-family Language paper Bilborough teaches under its own name. A tutor works a past extract or unseen text with the student, marks it against the real mark scheme for that board, and leaves the annotated version with them afterwards. 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.

Many of our Nottingham students take English alongside a science or maths A-level, where the same board-by-provider variation applies: see our Nottingham A-level maths page, our Nottingham A-level biology page and our Nottingham A-level chemistry page for the equivalent DfE figures in each subject.

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