GCSE Physics Tutors in Nottingham: The School Where 95% Sit Every Science

Nottingham City is a small unitary authority separate from the much larger Nottinghamshire, and GCSE Physics is a distinct, separately-graded qualification from Combined Science. At Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology, 95.1% of Year 11 pupils sat all three separate sciences in 2024/25 - against a Nottingham City average of just 27.8%. Leading Tuition's expert GCSE Physics tutors work with Nottingham students in both routes.

Nottingham City or Nottinghamshire? Confirming Where GCSE Physics Students' Schools Sit

Nottingham City is a unitary authority in its own right, registered on the Department for Education's Compare School and College Performance service under local-authority code 892, with 115 schools and colleges attached to it. Nottinghamshire is a separate, much larger local authority, code 891, covering 393 schools and colleges - nearly three and a half times as many as the city on its own. Both share a postcode area and a name most people use interchangeably, but DfE's own results tables keep them entirely apart.

That split catches out well-known "Nottingham" schools. The West Bridgford School, on Loughborough Road, gives its postal town as Nottingham and its postcode as NG2 7FA, yet DfE registers it in Nottinghamshire. George Spencer Academy and Redhill Academy carry the same pattern. The confusion runs both ways too: The Nottingham Emmanuel School gives its postal town as West Bridgford - the same place associated with a Nottinghamshire school above - yet DfE registers it inside Nottingham City itself. Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology (NUAST), the school at the centre of this page, sits at 93 Abbey Street and is confirmed on DfE's own register as Nottingham City, not Nottinghamshire - checked individually rather than assumed from its name or address, exactly like every other school named below.

Is GCSE Physics the Same Qualification as Combined Science?

GCSE Physics and Combined Science are not two names for the same exam. Physics is a separate-sciences qualification: a pupil taking it also sits Biology and Chemistry as two further GCSEs, and receives three individual grades. Combined Science, which exam boards and DfE label Science: Double Award, is one qualification covering all three sciences at once, producing two grades rather than three separate ones - and the Joint Council for Qualifications' own methodology is explicit about the consequence: "Science: Double Award counts as two GCSE entries. These entries, therefore, are counted twice both in the subject and in the overall figures." A pupil entered for Biology, Chemistry and Physics is counted once in each of those three separate rows, so adding the three subject totals together at any school does not produce a pupil headcount; it simply triples it.

Physics also has content that Combined Science pupils never study at all. AQA's own GCSE Physics 8463 specification gives its own contents page the heading "Space physics (physics only)" for Topic 8 - one of eight physics topic areas, and the only one carrying that label. The same specification lists ten required practical activities, and marks two of them "(physics only)": investigating the effectiveness of different materials as thermal insulators, and investigating the reflection and refraction of light. The other eight required practicals carry no such label, which is what a Combined Science pupil doing the physics component of their double award would still be expected to complete. Two further figures are deliberately absent from this page, and their absence applies to every school in England: the Department for Education states plainly that progress measures will not be published for the 2024/25 or 2025/26 academic years, because the pupils sitting GCSEs in those years had no Key Stage 2 assessment data after primary tests were cancelled during the pandemic - and there is no "Attainment 8 science element" anywhere in England's published data, since Attainment 8 has exactly two named, double-weighted elements (English and maths) plus three further EBacc-qualifying slots covering science, a language, and history or geography together, and three open slots for anything else.

Which Nottingham School Enters Almost Every Pupil for Triple Science?

Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology, on Abbey Street inside Nottingham City's own local-authority boundary, is a specialist STEM school - and its own DfE figures show it. In the 2024/25 results, NUAST entered 117 pupils for Biology, 116 for Chemistry and 116 for Physics, out of a Key Stage 4 cohort of 122. DfE's own additional-entry-and-achievement-measures page confirms the school's pupil-level triple-science rate directly: 95.1% of its pupils entered for biology, chemistry and physics together, against a Nottingham City average of 27.8% and an England average of 23.3%. 95.1% of 122 pupils is 116.02, which rounds to exactly the 116 shown for both Chemistry and Physics - so the school's real triple-science ceiling is 116, one below Biology's own higher total of 117, not simply "whichever of the three subjects has the most entries".

NUAST's Attainment 8 score, 51.1, sits well above both the Nottingham City figure (43) and the England all-state-schools figure (46.1) shown on the same page - and its grade 4+ rate in English and maths, 75.4%, similarly outpaces the city's 59.4% and England's 64.8%. But NUAST is not simply "the best school in the city": Fernwood School's own Attainment 8, 53.8, is higher still, even though Fernwood's triple-science entries (166 each for Biology, Chemistry and Physics, against a smaller Combined Science total of 127) show a less extreme split than NUAST's near-total triple-science cohort. A school built around triple science and a school with the single highest overall exam score are not automatically the same school.

Is Physics the Bottleneck Subject for Triple Science in Nottingham, or Is It Chemistry?

DfE's own triple-science measure counts pupils entered for all three separate sciences together, so it can never exceed the lowest of a school's three subject entry counts. Rather than assume Physics is, or is not, that constraint, this page checked school by school. At Nottingham Academy, the answer is Chemistry, not Physics: 66 pupils sat Biology and 64 sat Physics in the 2024/25 results, but only 57 sat Chemistry - so Physics, on 64 entries, is comfortably clear of the school's own real ceiling. At Nottingham Girls' High School GDST, an independent school inside the same Nottingham City boundary, the pattern reverses: 74 sat Biology and 73 sat Chemistry, but only 59 sat Physics, making Physics itself the tightest subject there.

Nationally the same "it depends" holds, but with a twist specific to Physics: England's 2026 results record 159,630 Physics entries - the fewest of the three separate sciences - against 159,731 for Chemistry (101 more) and 167,911 for Biology (8,281 more). So while Physics is not the bottleneck at every Nottingham school checked, it is nationally the smallest of the three subjects by entries, even if only by a razor-thin margin against Chemistry's 159,731. Physics's own grade 4+ rate, 91.6%, sits between Chemistry's 92.1% and Biology's 89.6% - a different ranking again, and not proof either way about which subject pupils find hardest.

GCSE Physics, Chemistry and Biology: How Do the 2026 England Entries and Grades Compare?

The table below sets Physics against the other two separate sciences and Combined Science, using England's 2026 results as republished by FFT Education Datalab, an independent analysis project funded by the Nuffield Foundation, cross-checked against the same underlying JCQ figures the sibling Nottingham science pages on this site independently sourced.

Physics sits in the middle of the three separate sciences on grade 4+ (91.6%), but bottom of the three on grade 7+ (45.9%, against Chemistry's 47.0% and just ahead of Biology's 43.5%) - a reminder that "hardest subject" depends entirely on which threshold is being asked about. Combined Science's entries figure looks enormous next to the three separate sciences chiefly because every candidate produces two grade entries, not because five times as many pupils take it: halving 942,776 gives 471,388 candidates, still around three times as many as sat Physics, but nowhere near the raw entries gap on its own.

Which Named Nottingham Schools Enter the Most Pupils for GCSE Physics?

Eight Nottingham City secondary schools were checked for this page - each confirmed against DfE's own register - covering the state-funded side of the city plus NUAST, the specialist school this page centres on. The table sets out each school's 2024/25 Attainment 8 score alongside its Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Combined Science entries.

NUAST's own Combined Science entry of just 1 pupil, against 116 or 117 for each separate science, sets it apart from every other school in the table - the next-lowest Combined Science total, Nottingham University Samworth Academy's 125, sits at the opposite end of the scale from its Biology, Chemistry and Physics entries of 28 each. Six of the seven non-NUAST schools enter exactly the same number of pupils for Biology, Chemistry and Physics, which DfE's own additional-entry-and-achievement-measures page confirms is one genuine shared triple-science cohort in each case, not a coincidence of rounding. Nottingham Academy remains the one state-funded exception where the three subject counts genuinely diverge, as the previous section covers. Attainment 8 scores across the eight schools range from 37.1 to 53.8, against a Nottingham City average of 43 and an England state-funded average of 46.1.

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Are Nottingham's Independent Schools Included in These Physics Figures?

No. Every figure so far, from NUAST's 116 Physics entries to the eight-school table above, comes from DfE's state-funded schools data, which excludes the independent sector by definition. Nottingham has two well-known independent schools sitting inside the very same Nottingham City boundary described earlier: Nottingham High School, on Waverley Mount, and Nottingham Girls' High School GDST, on Arboretum Street. Both are registered by DfE as "Other independent school" - inside Nottingham City's local authority geographically, but outside every state-funded figure used throughout this page.

Nottingham High School's own subjects-entered data shows 98 Biology entries and 97 Chemistry entries in the 2024/25 results, with no Physics or Combined Science GCSE row listed anywhere in the same table - Physics may be taught there as an IGCSE that this particular table does not track, though that is not independently confirmed. Nottingham Girls' High School GDST shows a fuller picture from a cohort of around 79 pupils: 74 Biology, 73 Chemistry and 59 Physics, again with no Combined Science row at all - and here it is Physics, not Chemistry, that trails the other two, the reversal of the pattern this page found at Nottingham Academy. Leading Tuition works with GCSE Physics students at both kinds of Nottingham school.

How Leading Tuition Works With Nottingham GCSE Physics Students

Whether a Nottingham student needs support with separate Physics or Combined Science is not a citywide question - it depends on their own school, as the entries above show. Our diagnostic assessment for every new Nottingham GCSE Physics student starts by confirming which qualification, and which specification, their own school has actually entered them for: AQA Physics (spec code 8463), Edexcel Physics (1PH0), OCR Gateway Science Physics A (J249) or OCR Twenty First Century Science Physics B (J259) each set slightly different required practicals and paper structures, and a revision plan built for one does not transfer cleanly to another.

Physics carries a content demand the other two sciences do not share to the same degree. Under AQA's specification, Physics is assessed across two written papers - one covering Energy, Electricity, Particle model of matter and Atomic structure, the other covering Forces, Waves, Magnetism and electromagnetism and Space physics - each worth 50% of the GCSE. AQA's own exam-writing guidance states that a minimum of 30% of marks across GCSE Physics test mathematical skills - the highest proportion of the three separate sciences, against a minimum of 20% in Chemistry and 10% in Biology, with the two combined science qualifications apportioned in the same 1:2:3 ratio. Appendix A of that same specification lists 23 equations pupils are expected to recall and apply entirely from memory, from weight and moment of a force through to kinetic energy and wave speed, with a further set of equations given to pupils on an equation sheet inside the exam itself that they must still select and apply correctly. Our tutors hold degrees from leading UK universities and build every programme around a student's own school, qualification and exam board, working one-to-one online through past-paper questions marked against the real mark scheme - drilling equation recall as its own skill, separate from the physics understanding it sits on top of, since a student who understands a topic can still lose marks by reaching for the wrong equation under exam pressure.

Figures above are drawn from the Department for Education's Key Stage 4 performance, 2024/25 release, its Compare School and College Performance service, the Joint Council for Qualifications' summer 2026 results as republished by FFT Education Datalab, and the exam boards' own specification pages, all checked on 2nd September 2026. For students planning beyond their GCSE results, our Nottingham A-Level Maths tuition guide covers other stages, and our sibling Nottingham GCSE Chemistry tutors, Nottingham GCSE Biology tutors, Nottingham GCSE Maths tutors and Nottingham GCSE English tutors pages cover other subjects. See our full GCSE Physics guide for how grade boundaries and topics work nationally, our Physics tutoring service page for how programmes are structured, and our overview of tutoring across Nottingham for our wider service in the city.

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