GCSE Maths Tutors in Nottingham

Leading Tuition provides GCSE maths tuition in Nottingham, where state-funded schools recorded a grade 4 or above GCSE maths rate of 66% in the 2025 results, against 72% across England and 74% in the separate Nottinghamshire local authority next door. This page sets out Nottingham's own Department for Education figures, school by school, and how our tutors work with Nottingham GCSE maths students.

Which Nottingham? Why the City and County Get Different GCSE Maths Results

Nottingham is a unitary authority covering the city itself, and it is a separate Department for Education local authority from Nottinghamshire, the surrounding county that includes West Bridgford, Beeston and the rest of the county's district areas. Both are routinely shortened to "Nottingham" in ordinary conversation and in some published tutoring content, but DfE publishes their GCSE results as two entirely separate datasets, and the two produce materially different figures. A family searching for GCSE maths tutoring "in Nottingham" needs to know which of the two describes their own child's school before any of the comparisons below mean anything.

The table sets Nottingham's 2025 GCSE maths results against Nottinghamshire and England, covering GCSE Mathematics on its own and the combined "grade 5 or above in English and maths" measure the Department for Education treats as its headline GCSE indicator.

On every measure in the table, Nottingham sits below both Nottinghamshire and England, while Nottinghamshire sits above both. The gap on GCSE maths at grade 4 or above is eight percentage points between the two local authorities. Two official DfE-linked tools give a slightly different figure for Nottingham's own combined grade 5+ English and maths rate: the Department's Key Stage 4 performance release, revised in August 2026, puts it at 41%, while the individual school comparison pages on DfE's Compare School and College Performance service put the same local-authority average at 39.8%, drawn from provisional performance-tables data published earlier in the year. Both figures come from the Department for Education; neither is wrong, and this page states both rather than picking one.

National context helps place both local authorities. Across England's local authorities, the 2025 range for the combined grade 5+ English and maths measure ran from 24.7% in Knowsley to 69.3% in Kingston upon Thames — a 44.6 percentage point spread. Nottingham's 41% and Nottinghamshire's 48% both sit inside that range, roughly a third and just under halfway up it respectively, rather than at either extreme.

The two kinds of measure in the table above answer slightly different questions. GCSE Mathematics on its own counts every pupil who sat the subject, regardless of how they did in English; the combined English and maths figure only counts a pupil once they have cleared the threshold in both subjects, which is why the combined rate is always lower than the solo maths rate for the same local authority — Nottingham's own maths-only grade 4+ rate of 66% falls to 61% once English is also required. For a family focused specifically on maths ability, the solo maths figures are the more direct comparison; the combined figure is what DfE and most school league tables use as the headline measure.

One further figure is missing from the table by design. Progress 8, which measures how much progress pupils make between key stage 2 and their GCSEs, cannot be published for the 2025 results. The Department for Education states this directly: "It is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26. This is because there is no KS2 prior attainment data available to use to calculate Progress 8 when the relevant cohorts reach the end of KS4, as primary tests and assessments were cancelled in academic years 2019/20 and 2020/21 due to COVID-19 disruption." The Department has also confirmed there will be no replacement measure for either year, so any current source quoting a 2025 Progress 8 figure for a Nottingham school is quoting a number DfE says it cannot produce.

For a family whose child attends a Nottingham city school, the borough-wide averages above describe roughly 3,455 pupils sitting GCSEs each year, against England's 625,647. What those averages cannot show is how far individual Nottingham schools sit from each other, which is often a wider gap than the one between Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.

Why Do 63% of Fernwood Pupils Reach Grade 5 in English and Maths When Only 28.5% at Ellis Guilford Do?

Nottingham's citywide averages combine results from all of its state-funded secondary schools, and the spread between the strongest and weakest of them is wider than the eight-point gap between Nottingham and Nottinghamshire above. The table sets out named, DfE-published 2025 results for three Nottingham secondary schools, chosen to show that range: Fernwood School, the strongest result among the schools checked for this page, and Ellis Guilford School and Djanogly City Academy, both below the city average.

Fernwood School's maths element of Attainment 8 — the double-weighted GCSE maths component within the wider score — was 10.8 in the 2025 results, more than two points above Nottingham's own citywide average of 8.5 and above England's 9.1. Djanogly City Academy and Ellis Guilford School both sat below both averages on maths, at 7.5 and 7.3 respectively. The gap between Fernwood's 63.0% grade 5+ English and maths rate and Ellis Guilford's 28.5% is 34.5 percentage points, comfortably wider than the eight-point gap between Nottingham and Nottinghamshire covered above.

Cohort size is worth noting alongside the percentages. Fernwood School's 2025 results cover 297 pupils, close to Djanogly City Academy's 231 and Ellis Guilford School's 267 — three broadly similar-sized year groups, so the gaps between them reflect a comparable scale of cohort rather than one school's figures being skewed by an unusually small or large group of pupils. Djanogly City Academy and Ellis Guilford School post almost identical Attainment 8 scores, 38 against 37.1, but their maths-element scores, 7.5 and 7.3, and their grade 5+ English and maths rates, 30.3% and 28.5%, are close enough that neither can be called clearly stronger than the other on these measures.

These three schools are not a ranking of every Nottingham secondary; they are named here because their 2025 results, drawn from DfE's published school-level performance data, illustrate a range that a single citywide average cannot show. A student's own school result is the figure that actually matters for planning GCSE maths support, and any Nottingham secondary school can be looked up directly on the Department for Education's Compare School and College Performance service, linked in the sources below.

What Does a Grade 4, 5 or 7 in GCSE Maths Get You Next in Nottingham?

A GCSE maths grade is not only a measure of the past two years' work; it is also a gatekeeper for what a Nottingham student can study next. Grade 4 is the level the Department for Education calls a "standard pass" and grade 5 a "strong pass", and the two thresholds behind Nottingham's 66% and 46% maths figures above translate directly into which sixth-form and college courses a student can start without a resit. Bilborough College, a Nottingham sixth-form college, sets out its own published entry requirements for exactly this reason.

Bilborough College's standard entry requirement for sixth-form study is "at least five GCSE's, including English and Maths, at grade 4 or above", with one Level 2 BTEC at Merit or higher allowed to count towards that total. For A-level Mathematics specifically, the college's own subject page sets a higher bar: "a grade 7 in Maths GCSE and grade 4 in English". A grade 4 at GCSE opens the door to sixth-form study in general at this Nottingham college; a grade 7, three full grades higher, is what the same college asks for before a student can continue studying maths itself at A-level.

Set against the school-level figures above, a grade 7 requirement sits well above the "grade 5 or above" threshold that Nottingham's own headline figures track, and further above the grade 4 threshold that most citywide comparisons use. For a Nottingham family whose child is aiming at a subject with entry requirements like Bilborough College's for maths, the relevant target from Year 10 onwards is not simply "a pass", but a specific numbered grade attached to a specific course.

Why Does Nottingham's 26.9% EBacc Entry Rate Matter for GCSE Maths Support?

Nottingham's own EBacc entry rate — the percentage of pupils sitting the full combination of English, maths, a science, a language and history or geography — sat at 26.9% in the 2025 results, well below the England state-funded average of 40.5%. A lower EBacc entry rate means a larger share of Nottingham GCSE students are taking a narrower combination of subjects alongside maths than the national picture would suggest, which is one reason our programmes treat GCSE maths as one part of a wider subject plan rather than in isolation. Beyond GCSE Maths itself, our tutors also cover the subjects Nottingham students most often pair it with, including Further Maths for students continuing to A-level, English Language and English Literature, and the sciences and humanities that make up the rest of the EBacc combination.

Leading Tuition works with GCSE maths students across Nottingham, whichever of the city's schools they attend and whichever exam board sets their papers — AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas all run GCSE maths specifications used somewhere in England, and grade boundaries and question style differ between them even for the same topic. Every programme starts with a short diagnostic assessment against a student's own school and exam board rather than a generic GCSE maths checklist, so a tutor can see immediately whether the priority is closing a specific topic gap, building exam technique, or working ahead of the school's own scheme of work.

Sessions run one-to-one online, with a shared whiteboard that lets a tutor work through past-paper questions, mark answers against the real mark scheme, and share annotated resources in real time. Tutors are matched to a student by subject, exam board and year group, and progress is reviewed against the student's own target grade at agreed intervals, whether that target is the grade 4 "standard pass" referenced above, a grade 5 "strong pass", or the higher grade thresholds that specific A-level subjects at colleges like Bilborough set for continuing a subject at sixth form.

Where a student is working towards a specific grade threshold, the tutor builds the programme's pacing around the exam series that threshold applies to, working backwards from past papers at the relevant tier and exam board. Foundation and Higher tier GCSE maths papers test different content and carry different maximum grades, and a mismatch between the tier a student is entered for and the grade they are aiming at is one of the most common gaps a diagnostic assessment uncovers.

Parents receive a short written note after every session summarising what was covered and what to practise before the next one, so that support at home lines up with what actually happened in the lesson rather than a generic revision list. Programmes are reviewed roughly every half-term against the student's own target grade, with the pacing adjusted if a mock exam or a school assessment shows the gap has narrowed faster, or slower, than expected.

See our full GCSE Maths tuition service for how a programme is structured across a full academic year, and our overview of tutoring across Nottingham for other subjects and levels. All figures above are drawn from the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance, 2024/25 release and its Compare School and College Performance service, checked on 25 August 2026. Bilborough College's entry requirements are drawn directly from its own published pages, linked where quoted above.

Frequently Asked Questions