DfE 2024/25 figures for every Nottingham sixth form and college that entered students for A-level maths, and how our tutors work with students at each.
Book a Free ConsultationNottingham city is served by eleven sixth forms and colleges that entered students for A-level Mathematics in 2024/25, and between them they recorded 605 A-level Maths entries — 245 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 maths students at sixth forms across the city.
Our expert A-level maths tutors help students across Nottingham with both the pure and the applied papers, whichever board their own sixth form has entered them for and whether they are taking Mathematics on its own or alongside Further Maths.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppThe Department for Education’s local-authority listing for Nottingham returns 115 schools and colleges. Checking the 16-to-18 subjects-entered page for every secondary school, sixth form and college on that list found eleven with an A-level Mathematics row for 2024/25. The rest have no sixth form, or no A-level Mathematics row in that year’s table. That is the real shape of A-level maths provision in the city, and it is not the shape of GCSE provision, where almost every secondary school enters a full cohort.
| Nottingham institution | A-level students | A-level Maths entries | Further Maths (A level) | Average result per entry, all subjects | DfE progress banding |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilborough College | 988 | 245 | 32 | C+ (33.7) | Below average (-0.1) |
| NUAST | 136 | 102 | 32 | B- (38.13) | Average (0.03) |
| Nottingham High School | 132 | 67 | 24 | A (49.75) | Above average (0.28) |
| Nottingham College | 301 | 57 | 7 | C- (27.27) | Below average (-0.43) |
| Bluecoat Aspley Academy | 148 | 41 | 5 | C- (27.26) | Below average (-0.25) |
| The Trinity Catholic School | 86 | 26 | 6 | C+ (33.49) | Average (0.05) |
| Nottingham Girls’ High School | 51 | 18 | 5 | B+ (44.09) | Average (0.06) |
| Nottingham Academy | 48 | 15 | 1 | D+ (23.17) | Below average (-0.47) |
| The Nottingham Emmanuel School | 99 | 13 | 3 | D+ (23.87) | Below average (-0.54) |
| Djanogly City Academy | 43 | 12 | 1 | C- (26.88) | Average (-0.06) |
| Nottingham Free School | 31 | 9 | none entered | C (31.1) | Average (-0.14) |
| Nottingham (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 27 August 2026 on the Department for Education’s Compare School and College Performance service. “A-level students” is the number of students the DfE A-level measures for that institution are based on. “Average result per entry” and the progress banding are both all-subject 16-to-18 measures, not Mathematics-only ones. The last two rows are the comparison lines DfE prints on each institution’s own page: the Nottingham line covers state-funded schools and colleges only, the England line covers all schools and colleges.
Two things stand out. The first is scale. Bilborough College’s 245 Mathematics entries are roughly 40% of the city’s 605, and the three largest providers — Bilborough, NUAST and Nottingham High School — account for 414 entries between them, close to 68% of the total. The second is how small the tail is. Five of the eleven entered fewer than twenty students for A-level Mathematics, and Nottingham Free School entered nine, with no Further Mathematics row at all.
That matters practically. A student at Bilborough is in a department that entered 245 for the subject, large enough to run parallel sets, a full Further Maths cohort and its own revision programme. A student at Djanogly City Academy is in one that entered twelve. Neither is better or worse in itself, but they are different teaching environments, and a student who falls behind in a group of twelve has fewer places to catch the material a second time.
The 605 figure is our own addition of the eleven institutional figures in the table above, not a Department for Education total — DfE publishes subject entries school by school and does not aggregate a single subject to city level. Anyone can re-add the column.
Entry counts on their own understate how differently these institutions treat the subject. Setting each one’s Mathematics entries against the size of its own A-level cohort gives the share of students taking maths, and across Nottingham that share runs from about 13% to 75%.
Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology entered 102 students for A-level Mathematics from an A-level cohort of 136 — three-quarters of that cohort. NUAST describes itself as “Nottingham’s leading STEM academy and sixth form”, and the entry pattern bears that out: it also entered 32 for Further Mathematics, matching Bilborough’s A-level Further Maths entry from an A-level cohort less than a seventh the size.
Nottingham High School is the next most maths-heavy, with 67 entries from 132 students, a little over half the cohort. Two of the smaller sixth forms come next: Nottingham Girls’ High School entered 18 from a cohort of 51, about 35%, and The Trinity Catholic School 26 from 86, about 30%. Bilborough College, for all its scale, sits below both at about 25%: 245 from 988, and Nottingham College lower again at roughly 19%, 57 from 301. At the other end, The Nottingham Emmanuel School entered 13 students from a cohort of 99, around 13% — the lowest share of the eleven.
These proportions are calculated here from the two DfE figures for each institution; the Department publishes both but does not publish the ratio. What the ratio tells a parent is what kind of maths department their child is joining. In a sixth form where three students in four take maths, timetabling is built around the subject, sets can be split by pace, and a student struggling with the mechanics paper will usually find someone else in the same position. Where thirteen students take it, the group is likely taught as one, at one pace, and an individual gap is harder to address inside lesson time.
Our expert A-level maths tutors work one-to-one with Nottingham students in both kinds of setting — whether your child is one of 245 at a large college or one of a dozen in a small school group, the programme is built around the topics they have actually not secured.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppBilborough College and NUAST, the two largest providers of A-level maths in the city, both publish a GCSE threshold for the subject, and they land in the same place. Bilborough College states that “to study Mathematics at Bilborough College, you need a grade 7 in Maths GCSE and grade 4 in English”. NUAST Sixth Form asks for five GCSEs at grade 6 to study A levels at all, and adds that “our entry requirement for A level mathematics is a GCSE mathematics grade of 7 or above”.
Further Mathematics is a grade higher at both. Bilborough asks students to “achieve at least a grade 8 in GCSE Mathematics”; NUAST sets “an additional entry requirement for A level Further mathematics” of “a GCSE mathematics grade of 8 or above”. For a Year 11 in Nottingham, that is the practical target: not a pass, and not a grade 5, but a 7 for Mathematics and an 8 if Further Maths is the plan. Our Nottingham GCSE maths page sets out how far that sits above the city’s own headline GCSE figures.
Nottingham High School structures the choice differently. Its sixth formers “are offered a programme of three subjects, or four if one option is Further Maths”, so Further Mathematics there is an addition rather than a substitution — which is part of why 24 of its 67 mathematicians take it.
The exam board is decided by the institution, not the city. Bilborough College names AQA as its board for Mathematics. NUAST Sixth Form names Edexcel. A Nottingham student cannot assume that a friend’s past papers at another sixth form are the ones they will sit, and a tutor needs to know which sixth form a student attends before choosing a past paper.
Nottingham the unitary authority and Nottinghamshire the county are separate Department for Education local authorities, and at A level they report different averages. Nottingham’s state-funded schools and colleges averaged a C, 31.64 points per entry, in 2024/25. Nottinghamshire’s averaged a C+, 34.65 points. England averaged a B- and 36.1 points, but that line covers all schools and colleges, independent ones included, so it is not like-for-like with either authority. On those figures the county sits nearer the national line than the city does.
The difference from GCSE is that at 16 a student is no longer allocated by catchment. Sixth forms recruit across the boundary and students travel. NUAST Sixth Form says as much in its own words, describing a provision “for the students of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and beyond”. Bilborough College’s 988 A-level students are more than three times the next largest cohort in the table above, Nottingham College’s 301.
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Two Nottinghamshire schools within easy reach of the city illustrate what is on the other side of the line. The West Bridgford School entered 93 students for A-level Mathematics from an A-level cohort of 223, averaged a B+ and 41.91 points per entry across all its A levels, and holds an ABOVE AVERAGE DfE progress banding with a score of 0.37. The Becket School entered 63 for Mathematics, averaged a B- and 35.31 on the same measure, and is banded BELOW AVERAGE at -0.14. Being in the county is not on its own a guarantee of anything.
For a family choosing where a child studies A-level maths, the useful conclusion is that the authority boundary is close to irrelevant and the individual institution is close to everything. The city and county split at GCSE is a genuine planning constraint because school places are allocated geographically; at sixth-form level it mostly is not.
Bilborough College and Nottingham High School both publish their own results-day statements; the Department for Education publishes verified figures for an earlier cohort months later. The two rarely say the same thing, and neither is wrong.
Bilborough College announced a 97% pass rate across all courses in its 2026 results statement, with 111 students achieving A*-A grades in A-level Maths. Its verified DfE figures for the 2024/25 cohort show an A-level progress score of -0.1, which the Department bands BELOW AVERAGE because the score and its whole confidence interval, -0.14 to -0.05, sit below zero. The threshold is zero, not England’s own progress score of -0.03. Both statements are accurate. A pass rate counts how many students cleared the lowest passing grade; a progress score measures how far each student moved from where their GCSEs said they were starting. A large, inclusive college can score very well on the first and below average on the second.
Nottingham High School’s 2026 results statement reported 28% of all passes at A*, 65% at A or above, 61 students with three A grades or better and 13 with at least three A*s. Its verified 2024/25 progress score is 0.28, banded ABOVE AVERAGE, with a confidence interval of 0.17 to 0.38. Here the headline and the verified measure agree, which is itself informative.
The practical reading for a Nottingham parent: a results-day percentage tells you about the exit and about the cohort that was admitted; the progress banding tells you about the distance travelled. If your child is aiming well above their college’s average result per entry, the average is not a forecast — but it does tell you how much of the work will need to happen outside the timetable.
Our A-level maths tutors help Nottingham students aiming above their sixth form’s average result per entry, working through their own board’s past papers and mark schemes rather than a generic A-level checklist.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppEvery programme starts with the student’s own sixth form and board. A student at Bilborough College is sitting AQA papers; a student at NUAST is sitting Edexcel; a student at one of the smaller school sixth forms in the table above may be on a different board again. That determines which past papers, which mark schemes and which examiner report a tutor works from in the first session, and it is the first thing we establish.
From there the split between pure and applied content does most of the work. The pure content is the bulk of the course, and it is where a Year 12 who was comfortable at GCSE most often stalls: algebraic fraction work, proof, and the step from differentiation as a rule to differentiation as a tool. The applied half — statistics and mechanics — tends to fail for a different reason, usually modelling assumptions rather than technique. A diagnostic session separates the two before anything is planned, because the remedy is not the same.
For students taking Further Mathematics, sessions run alongside the single-maths programme rather than replacing it, since core pure content is examined in both. Students preparing for maths-heavy degree courses often pair the subject with A-level physics, and we cover the mechanics overlap between them explicitly.
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 58 reviews. Our wider A-level maths 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 245 A-level Mathematics entries at Bilborough, against 102 at NUAST and 67 at Nottingham High School. Those three account for 414 of the 605 A-level Maths entries recorded across the eleven Nottingham city institutions that entered anyone for the subject. The remaining eight range from 57 at Nottingham College down to 9 at Nottingham Free School. Scale is not the same as outcome: across all their A-level subjects Nottingham High School averaged an A, 49.75 points per entry, while Bilborough averaged a C+ and 33.7.
The city’s two largest providers of the subject both ask for a grade 7. Bilborough College requires a grade 7 in GCSE Maths and a grade 4 in English. NUAST Sixth Form requires five GCSEs at grade 6 for A-level study generally, and a grade 7 in GCSE mathematics for the subject itself. For Further Mathematics both raise the bar to a grade 8. Requirements are set institution by institution, so a student applying to a smaller school sixth form should check that school’s own published figure rather than assume the Bilborough threshold applies.
Ten of the eleven Nottingham city institutions that entered students for A-level Mathematics in 2024/25 also entered at least one for Further Mathematics; Nottingham Free School entered none. The provision is very concentrated: Bilborough College and NUAST each entered 32, and Nottingham High School 24, which is 88 of the 116 A-level Further Maths entries the eleven recorded between them — our own addition of the DfE per-institution figures, not a DfE city total. Nottingham Academy and Djanogly City Academy each entered one. Bilborough also entered 64 for Further Maths at AS level, a separate qualification that sits outside that A-level count.
It depends entirely on the institution. Bilborough College names AQA as its exam board for Mathematics on its own course page. NUAST Sixth Form names Edexcel on its. There is no city-wide or county-wide arrangement, so two Nottingham students in the same year group can sit different papers with different question styles. Before buying past papers or booking tuition, confirm the board with the sixth form directly. A tutor working from the wrong board’s papers will still be teaching the right mathematics, but not the right examination.
On the authority averages, the county is ahead: Nottinghamshire’s state-funded schools and colleges averaged a C+ and 34.65 points per entry across all A levels in 2024/25, against a C and 31.64 for the state-funded schools and colleges in Nottingham city. England’s B- and 36.1 covers all schools and colleges, independent ones included, so it is not a like-for-like line with either authority. The range inside the city is far wider than the three-point gap between the two authorities: the eleven institutions in the table above run from 49.75 points at Nottingham High School down to 23.17 at Nottingham Academy. At 16 there is no catchment, so the institution matters and the authority mostly does not.
Not on its own. Bilborough College reported a 97% pass rate across all courses in its 2026 results statement, and 111 students achieving A*-A in A-level Maths. Its verified DfE progress score for the 2024/25 cohort is -0.1, which the Department bands BELOW AVERAGE because the score is below zero and its whole confidence interval is below zero too. The two measure different things: a pass rate counts students clearing the lowest passing grade, while a progress score measures how far students moved from their GCSE starting point. Read both, and read the subject entry numbers alongside them.
Tell us which sixth form your child attends and which board they sit, and our expert A-level maths tutors will build a programme around the pure and applied topics they have not yet secured.
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