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

Oxford International College entered 142 students for A-level Mathematics in 2024/25, the largest Mathematics cohort of any Oxford sixth form or college with published results, according to Department for Education data. The Cherwell School was a close second with 140, and Magdalen College School third with 132, of whom 56 also sat Further Mathematics. This DfE-sourced comparison covers all 17 Oxford sixth forms, colleges and further education institutions within three miles of the city centre.

Which Oxford Sixth Forms Actually Enter Students for A-Level Maths?

Seventeen sixth forms, colleges and further education institutions within three miles of Oxford city centre entered students for A-level Mathematics in the 2024/25 academic year, the most recent cohort for which the Department for Education has published full results — a wider list than most comparisons of Oxford's sixth forms use, because it includes several small independent colleges and one further education college alongside the more familiar named schools. 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 Rye 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. Two more 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 and no longer appear in current admissions rounds.

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

Activate Learning's own whole-programme figures illustrate why: across its entire A-level cohort, its progress score is -0.34, banded BELOW AVERAGE, and its average grade is D+ at 22.99 points — both a group-wide figure, not an Oxford-specific one, and not comparable on a like-for-like basis with the single-site schools in the tables below.

At Magdalen College School, 56 of the 132 Mathematics entries — 42% of the cohort — also sat Further Mathematics, the highest proportion of any Oxford institution checked. Mathematics is the single most-entered A-level subject at both Oxford High School GDST, where its 37 entries outnumber Biology and Chemistry at 23 each, and at d'Overbroeck's, where its 97 entries stand well clear of Economics, the school's next most popular subject at 57.

St Edward's School runs A-levels and the full International Baccalaureate Diploma side by side. Families weighing the two routes can compare our A-Level Tuition and IB Tuition pages for how each subject differs between them. Alongside its 38 A-level Mathematics and 13 Further Mathematics entries, a separate cohort of 61 IB Diploma students recorded 55 Standard Level and 6 Higher Level Mathematics entries in the same year, under the Department for Education's 'Mathematical Studies' heading for IB mathematics components. A student choosing between the two routes at the same school is choosing between two different qualifications, not two exam boards for the same one.

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, which is a different question from a raw average grade — and applying it to Oxford's seven state sixth forms produces a genuinely different ranking from the one their exam results alone would suggest.

Oxford Spires Academy has the fourth-lowest average grade of the seven, B- at 35.03 points from 71 students, yet the highest progress score: +0.26, banded ABOVE AVERAGE by DfE. The Cherwell School has both the highest average grade of the seven, B at 40.32 points from 312 students, and the highest retention, 98.1%, but its progress score of +0.2 sits marginally below Oxford Spires's. The Swan School's own progress score, +0.21, looks close to Oxford Spires's on paper, but DfE bands it 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. Matthew Arnold School's average grade, C+ at 33.98 points, and its progress score of 0, banded AVERAGE, sit close to the middle of the group; its confidence interval of -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. Neither is a statistical outlier in isolation: DfE bands roughly one in twenty schools nationally as WELL BELOW AVERAGE and around a quarter as BELOW AVERAGE.

DfE also publishes one measure that is genuinely specific to Mathematics itself, rather than a student's whole A-level programme: 'Achieving advanced level maths qualifications'. At The Cherwell School, 44.0% of the relevant cohort achieved this, against an Oxfordshire average of 26.3% and an England average of 30.0% — the one figure on this page that measures Maths outcomes directly rather than a whole A-level programme's progress score or average grade.

The gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students runs in opposite directions at two schools less than a mile apart. The Cherwell School's 21 disadvantaged A-level students recorded a progress score of -0.28, against an England non-disadvantaged average of -0.01. Cheney School's smaller group of 12 disadvantaged students recorded +0.26, a positive score, though DfE's own confidence interval for that figure, -0.16 to 0.68, is wide enough that a true score of zero cannot be ruled out from 12 students alone.

The Independent Sixth Forms: Same Subject, a Different Story

DfE does publish a 16-to-18 progress score for several 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 nine independent schools and colleges checked here that do have one, it produces a genuine surprise: the highest whole-programme progress score of any of the 17 Oxford institutions checked, state or independent, belongs to Kings Education (Oxford), not d'Overbroeck's.

*St Edward's AAB+ figure is measured over the 68 of its 116 A-level entrants captured in that specific DfE measure, not the whole cohort.

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 achieving at least three A grades including two facilitating subjects. Its progress score, +0.24, is still comfortably ABOVE AVERAGE — but it 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. Among the nine independent schools and colleges checked, only St Edward's School and Cherwell College Oxford record a negative progress score, at -0.04 and -0.36 respectively; St Edward's AAB+ rate of 25.0% is measured over the 68 of its 116 A-level entrants captured in that specific measure, since a further part of the school's sixth form sits the IB Diploma instead.

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Which Exam Board, and What About Core Maths?

A-level Mathematics in England is set by three awarding bodies — Edexcel, AQA and OCR — each publishing its own past papers, grade boundaries and specification, though all three assess the same core Pure and Applied content mapped out in the Department for Education's own subject content requirements. A sixth form chooses one board for the whole cohort, so a student's own past papers and grade boundaries are specific to whichever board their school has entered them for, not a generic 'A-level Maths' standard.

Core Maths — recorded by DfE under the qualification title 'Mathematical Studies' when it is not an IB component — is a separate Level 3 Certificate, sat alongside other subjects rather than as an A-level, for students who want to continue some mathematics without a full A-level course. None of the five Oxford state schools checked in this comparison — The Cherwell School, Cheney School, Oxford Spires Academy, Matthew Arnold School and The Swan School — recorded a single Core Maths entry in 2024/25, unlike some neighbouring authorities, where several schools do. That does not mean no route exists for a student who wants to keep some mathematics without the full A-level; it means none of these five entered a student for this particular qualification in this particular year.

St Edward's School's IB Diploma cohort offers Oxford's clearest structured alternative to A-level Mathematics for exactly this kind of student: 55 of its 61 IB Diploma students in 2024/25 studied Mathematics at Standard Level, a smaller commitment than the 6 who took it at Higher Level alongside Higher Level study in three other subjects. Whichever route a student is on — Edexcel, AQA or OCR A-level Mathematics, or IB Mathematics at either level — the actual content, papers and target grade are what determine where extra help is useful, not the label on the course.

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 — Banbury, Bicester, Didcot, Abingdon and Witney as well as Oxford itself. 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.

Most, but not all, of the 17 Oxford institutions checked on this page beat the Oxfordshire county-wide average -- 13 of 17 do. The Cherwell School's 40.32 points and Cheney School's 38.23 sit well clear of the county's 33.46, and Oxford Spires Academy and Matthew Arnold School, at 35.03 and 33.98 points, still match or exceed it. But two of the seven state schools checked fall well short: Greyfriars Catholic School averages 15.11 points, a grade D-, and The Oxford Academy averages 25.6 points, a grade C-, both well below the county figure. Activate Learning and Cherwell College Oxford, neither of them a mainstream secondary school with its own sixth form, also fall below it. A single county-wide average understates what several of Oxford's own strongest state and independent sixth forms achieve, but it does not follow that every school within the city beats it -- a family should check an individual school's own published results rather than assume city location alone is predictive.

What This Means If You're Choosing Between an Oxford Sixth Form and a Tutor

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. A Year 11 student who had been planning to join either now needs an alternative Year 12 entry route, and the 17 schools and colleges set out above, within three miles of the city centre, are every institution for which the Department for Education has published A-level Mathematics results for 2024/25.

Retention is the other figure worth reading before results day arrives. 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; The Cherwell School retained 98.1%, the highest. DfE marks the equivalent figure not available 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 Rye 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 Mathematics grade: their current working level against their target, on the specification their own sixth form has entered them for.

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