A-Level Biology Tutors in Oxford: 17 Sixth Forms and Colleges Compared

The Cherwell School entered 86 students for A-level Biology in 2024/25, the largest Biology cohort of any Oxford sixth form or college with published results, according to Department for Education data. Oxford International College was second with 67 full A-level entries -- plus a further 71 at AS level -- and Magdalen College School third with 46. This DfE-sourced comparison covers all 17 Oxford sixth forms, colleges and further education institutions with published A-level Biology entries for 2024/25.

Which Oxford Sixth Forms and Colleges Actually Teach A-Level Biology?

Seventeen sixth forms, colleges and further education institutions within three miles of Oxford city centre entered students for A-level Biology in the 2024/25 academic year, the most recent cohort for which the Department for Education has published full results. Seven are state secondary schools with their own sixth forms — The Cherwell School, Cheney School, Oxford Spires Academy, Matthew Arnold School, The Swan School, Greyfriars Catholic School and The Oxford Academy — nine are independent schools or colleges: Oxford International College, Magdalen College School, Headington School Oxford, Oxford High School GDST, St Edward's School, d'Overbroeck's, Kings Education (Oxford), Cherwell College Oxford and Wychwood School — and one, Activate Learning, is a general further education college whose published figures cover its whole multi-site student body, not only its Oxford campus. This list sits inside a wider total of 22 institutions with a published 16-to-18 phase within three miles of the centre: beyond the 17, two centrally located providers a Year 11 student might once have shortlisted, Oxford Sixth Form College on King Edward Street and Carfax College on Hythe Bridge Street, closed on 31 August 2025 and 10 October 2025 respectively; two more, The Iffley Academy and Ruskin College, have no 16-to-18 data published for 2024/25 at all; and one, St Clare's, Oxford, teaches the International Baccalaureate rather than A-levels and recorded no GCE A-level Biology entries, though it did enter 33 students for IB Biology at Higher Level and 20 at Standard Level.

One name on this list is worth a second look. DfE's Compare School Performance service, publishing these 2024/25 figures in April 2026, lists this institution as "Headington Rye Oxford". Checking the Department for Education's own Get Information About Schools register on 2 September 2026 finds a different current name for the same URN: Headington School Oxford. The register also records why: the nearby girls' school Rye St Antony merged into it on 19 March 2024, which is where the transitional "Rye" name in the DfE results came from. The 43 A-level Biology entries and 124-student whole A-level cohort quoted below belong to this one institution under both names, not two different schools.

*Activate Learning is a multi-site further education college covering several Oxfordshire campuses, not a single-site sixth form; its A-level Biology entries above are specific to the qualification its students completed, but its whole-programme progress score and grade elsewhere on this page cover its entire 405-student group-wide A-level cohort, not only students at its Oxpens Road, Oxford site.

Cherwell College Oxford, 17th on this list with 3 Biology entries, is a small independent tutorial college on Bath Place -- an entirely separate institution from The Cherwell School at the top of the table, despite the near-identical name. The two share no ownership, site or governance, and DfE lists them under different URNs.

Is Biology Really Oxford's Biggest Science, Ahead of Chemistry and Physics?

Every one of the 17 institutions above that enters students for A-level Biology also enters students for A-level Chemistry and, in all but two cases, Physics -- so the entry counts allow a direct, same-subject-area comparison that no published DfE measure states outright. At 10 of the 17, Biology is the largest or joint-largest of the three sciences by A-level entries -- ahead of both Chemistry and Physics. Cheney School enters 32 for Biology against 27 for Chemistry and 14 for Physics; Oxford Spires Academy enters 29 against 25 and 19; Matthew Arnold School enters 27 against 18 and 19; Headington School Oxford enters 43 against 36 and 22; Activate Learning enters 35 against 25 and 17; and at the three smallest cohorts, Cherwell College Oxford, The Oxford Academy and Wychwood School, Biology also leads. Oxford High School GDST ties Biology and Chemistry exactly, 23 entries each, and St Edward's School ties Biology and Physics at 16 GCE A-level entries each. The Oxford Academy and Wychwood School recorded no A-level Physics entries at all in 2024/25 -- absent from their subjects-entered lists, not merely small.

Chemistry leads outright at six institutions, including The Cherwell School itself, where its 88 Chemistry entries narrowly beat Biology's 86 and its 72 Physics entries trail both -- a closer three-way race than the Biology cohort's sheer size might suggest. Chemistry also leads at Magdalen College School (71 against 46 for Biology and 60 for Physics, the one school here where Biology is the smallest of the three sciences), d'Overbroeck's (44 against 42), Oxford International College (81 against 67), and Kings Education (Oxford) (12 against 9). Physics leads outright at only one of the 17: Greyfriars Catholic School, where its 10 entries edge out Biology's 9 and Chemistry's 6.

Table shows GCE A-level entries only (AS-level entries, where also recorded, are set out in the roster table above and in the text). A dash means no A-level entry in that subject appears in the institution's own 2024/25 subjects-entered list.

How Do Oxford's State Sixth Forms Compare on Progress, Not Just Grades?

The Department for Education's 16-to-18 progress score compares each student's actual A-level grades against the grades achieved nationally by students with the same GCSE results -- a whole-programme measure covering every A-level a student sat, not Biology specifically, since DfE does not publish a Biology-only progress score for individual schools. Applying it to Oxford's seven state sixth forms produces a genuinely different ranking from the one their Biology entry counts alone would suggest.

Oxford Spires Academy has the second-largest Biology cohort among the state schools, 29 entries, and also the highest whole-programme progress score of the seven: +0.26, banded ABOVE AVERAGE. The Cherwell School, with by far the largest Biology cohort at 86, sits third on progress at +0.2, behind both Oxford Spires and The Swan School's +0.21 -- though DfE bands the Swan score only AVERAGE rather than ABOVE AVERAGE, because its confidence interval, -0.04 to 0.45, spans zero; a smaller cohort of 28 students produces a wider margin of error around the same central figure. Cheney School, whose 32 Biology entries are the largest of any state school after Cherwell and Oxford Spires, records +0.17, also ABOVE AVERAGE. Matthew Arnold School's progress score of 0, banded AVERAGE, sits in the middle of the group; its confidence interval, -0.12 to 0.11, also spans zero. The two lowest average grades among the seven belong to Greyfriars Catholic School, D- at 15.11 points, and The Oxford Academy, C- at 25.6 points -- both also record negative progress scores, -0.69 and -0.44 respectively, banded WELL BELOW AVERAGE and BELOW AVERAGE, even though both still out-entered Biology ahead of Chemistry in their own subjects-entered lists.

The Independent Sixth Forms and Colleges: Same Subject, Different Outcomes

DfE does publish a 16-to-18 progress score for most of Oxford's independent schools and colleges, calculated from the GCSE results of students who sat national curriculum assessments before joining -- though some small colleges recruit heavily from overseas and have no linkable GCSE record, so no progress score is published for them at all. Applied to the institutions checked here that do have one, the highest whole-programme progress score of any of the 17 Oxford institutions, state or independent, belongs to Kings Education (Oxford) -- whose Biology cohort of 9 is among the smallest on this page.

Magdalen College School posts the highest raw average grade of any of the 17 Oxford institutions checked, A at 51.54 points, and the highest AAB+ rate, 71.8% of its 156 A-level students -- yet its Biology cohort, 46, is the smallest of the three sciences at the school, well behind Chemistry's 71. Its progress score, +0.24, is comfortably ABOVE AVERAGE, but sits below both Kings Education (Oxford)'s +0.78 and d'Overbroeck's +0.55, two schools whose own average grades, B at 38.74 points and A- at 45.82 points, are both lower than Magdalen's. Oxford International College's 64.6% AAB+ rate is the second-highest on this page, from a cohort in which 67 students completed full A-level Biology and a further 71 sat it at AS level -- more entries at AS than at full A-level, a pattern the college's Chemistry (93 AS against 81 A-level) and Physics (83 against 65) entries repeat, consistent with a college that also takes on Year 12 and retake students partway through their two-year programme. St Edward's School runs A-levels and the full International Baccalaureate side by side: alongside its 16 GCE A-level Biology entries, a separate IB Biology cohort of 6 Standard Level and 11 Higher Level students sat a different, IB-specific qualification in the same year -- 17 more science students the GCE figures above do not count. Among the nine independent schools and colleges checked, only St Edward's School and Cherwell College Oxford record a negative progress score, -0.04 and -0.36 respectively.

What Parents Say

DP

Deborah Prior

★★★★★

Confidence and progress

My son was low in confidence after COVID and the gaps in learning were building up. Using this service helped plug those gaps, rebuild confidence, and improve his ability to learn properly again.

NI

Nicola

★★★★★

Amazing tutors!

We arranged maths and English tuition ahead of GCSEs and both tutors were brilliant. My daughter's grades improved, and by results day she achieved two grades higher than in her mock exams.

AJ

Alison Jacomb

★★★★★

Biology finally clicked

My daughter was struggling to see how the different topics in A-level Biology connected to each other before her mocks. A few sessions focused on exam technique and past papers made a real difference to her confidence.

See more reviews on Trustpilot

Which Exam Boards Set A-Level Biology, and Is One Being Withdrawn?

Four awarding bodies currently offer A-level Biology in England. AQA's specification, 7402, has been taught since 2015. OCR's Biology A, specification code H420, is also live and unaffected. Pearson Edexcel's Biology A was first taught in 2015 with first assessment in 2017. WJEC's England-facing board, Eduqas, has taught its Biology specification, reference code A400QS, since September 2015. A sixth form chooses one board for its whole Biology cohort rather than letting individual students pick, so a student's own past papers and grade boundaries are specific to whichever board their school has entered them for.

A fifth specification is on its way out. OCR's own qualifications pages state that it will stop offering AS and A-level Biology B, "Advancing Biology" (specification code H422), following a review of its general qualifications suite. The final first-teaching date is September 2026, the final AS-level assessment opportunity is June 2027, and the final A-level assessment opportunity is June 2028. A sixth form that has been running Biology B rather than OCR's unaffected Biology A (H420) will need to move a Year 12 cohort starting after September 2026 onto a different specification -- from OCR itself or from one of the other three boards -- since Biology B will no longer be available to start.

The practical endorsement is separate from all of this, and separate from the A*-E grade itself. AQA's own specification is explicit: A-level grades are based only on marks from written exams, and a separate endorsement of practical skills is taken alongside the A-level, assessed by teachers through direct observation of a student's competency in skills that cannot be tested in writing. It is reported as a pass or not-classified alongside the grade, not blended into it, and it does not appear in any of the DfE performance figures on this page -- a school's average grade or progress score says nothing about how its students performed on the practical endorsement specifically.

How Does Oxford Compare With the Rest of Oxfordshire and England?

Oxford is a city inside Oxfordshire local authority, and when the Department for Education compares a school's results against "Oxfordshire state-funded schools and colleges", that average covers the whole county, not Oxford alone. The county-wide average for 2024/25 is a grade C+, 33.46 points per A-level entry, with 15.6% of students achieving AAB or higher including two facilitating subjects and 92.1% retained to the end of their main course of study. England's all-schools average sits higher again: grade B-, 36.1 points, 17.5% AAB+, 93.1% retained. DfE bands schools nationally into five progress tiers -- 5% WELL ABOVE AVERAGE, 21% ABOVE AVERAGE, 43% AVERAGE, 26% BELOW AVERAGE and 5% WELL BELOW AVERAGE -- so a school landing ABOVE AVERAGE, like five of the seven Oxford state schools and six of the nine independents checked here, sits in roughly the top quarter of schools and colleges nationally on this specific measure.

Most of the state and independent institutions checked on this page beat the Oxfordshire county-wide average on points, though not every one does: Greyfriars Catholic School's 15.11 points and Cherwell College Oxford's 30.91 both fall short, and The Oxford Academy's 25.6 points sits below it too. That does not track neatly with Biology entry counts either -- The Oxford Academy enters more students for Biology (11) than for Chemistry (5), and Biology is its largest science, despite the school's below-average whole-programme figures. A family should read a school's own subject-specific offer and its whole-cohort results as two separate questions, not one.

What This Means If You're Choosing an Oxford Sixth Form for Biology

Two of Oxford's most centrally located sixth-form providers closed within six weeks of each other in 2025: Oxford Sixth Form College, on King Edward Street, on 31 August, and Carfax College, on Hythe Bridge Street, on 10 October. Neither has any 2024/25 Biology entries published, since neither operated a full academic year after those dates, and a Year 11 student who had been planning to join either now needs an alternative Year 12 entry route among the 17 schools and colleges set out above.

Retention is worth reading before results day arrives, and it does not always track with Biology cohort size. The Swan School retained 82.4% of its A-level cohort to the end of their main course of study in 2024/25, the lowest of the seven state schools in this comparison, despite entering more students for Biology (8) than Physics (2). Activate Learning's group-wide retention, 75.4%, is lower still, though that figure -- like its -0.34 BELOW AVERAGE progress score and D+ average grade -- covers its entire 405-student multi-site cohort, not only its Oxford campus's 35 full A-level Biology entries. DfE marks the retention measure NA for most of the independent schools and colleges checked -- Magdalen College School, Oxford High School GDST, St Edward's School, d'Overbroeck's, Oxford International College, Headington School Oxford, Kings Education (Oxford), Cherwell College Oxford and Wychwood School all show NA for this specific measure -- so a strong average grade at any of them is evidence about the students who completed the course, not a guarantee about how many of the original Year 12 intake were still enrolled to sit it.

None of this changes what actually moves an individual student's Biology grade: their current working level against their target, on the specification and practical endorsement requirements their own sixth form has entered them for.

Frequently Asked Questions