A-Level Biology Tutors in Reading: The DfE Sixth-Form Data

Twelve Reading sixth forms made 271 A-level Biology entries in 2024/25, and none of them was a further-education or sixth-form college - Reading has none. Kendrick School entered 60 candidates, the largest Biology cohort in the borough, ahead of Reading School's 54 and Highdown's 40. Two of the twelve providers behind these figures no longer exist under the names the Department for Education recorded them by.

How Many Reading Sixth Forms Teach A-Level Biology?

The Department for Education's Compare School and College Performance service lists nineteen schools and colleges under Reading local authority at 16-18 level, and twelve of them made an A-level exam entry of any subject in 2024/25 - the same twelve that entered A-level Biology specifically. Every one of the nineteen carries the institution type Academy, Independent school, Maintained school or Special school; the word “College” never appears against a single row. Reading has no further-education college and no sixth-form college of its own: every A-level Biology place in the borough sits inside a school sixth form.

That absence has a specific history, not just a gap in the data. Reading College and School of Arts and Design, once the town's general further-education college, closed on 31 December 2003, recorded on its own government register as the result of an amalgamation rather than a shutdown of provision. Activate Learning, the further-education group that now runs a site branded Reading College, is itself registered with the Department for Education not in Reading but in Oxfordshire, headquartered at Oxpens Road in Oxford - so whatever A-level teaching happens there is filed against Oxfordshire's local-authority figures, not Reading's, and never surfaces in a Reading-specific search of DfE's own tools. A parent searching Reading's own performance data for that site will draw a blank not because it teaches nothing, but because the department counts it somewhere else entirely.

Of the seven Reading establishments with no published 16-18 data, most are simply not conventional sixth-form providers. The Avenue Special School and Hamilton School are special schools, and Red Balloon Learner Centre Reading is alternative provision. River Academy, a free school that opened on 1 September 2024, is too new to have reached Year 12. OneSchool Global Reading Senior Campus is recorded by DfE as NE - it did not enter any students for the qualifications the 16-18 measures cover. Reading Girls' School is registered with an age range of 11 to 18 but carries no published 16-18 data for 2024/25 either; DfE does not state why, and an absent figure at this cohort size is evidence of nothing being published, not evidence that nothing happened.

Where Does Each Reading School Rank on A-Level Biology Entries?

The Department for Education publishes a subjects-entered table for every 16-18 provider, and the column it counts is headed number of exam entries. Biology is a single-sit subject for almost every student, so entries and students are close to the same thing here - unlike A-level Mathematics, where a student sitting both Mathematics and Further Mathematics appears twice. All twelve Reading providers that entered A-level candidates in 2024/25 are in the table below.

Source: Department for Education, Compare School and College Performance, subjects entered, read for each of the twelve providers, 16-to-18 results for 2024/25, read on 2 September 2026.

Kendrick School's 60 GCE A-level Biology entries are the most of any Reading provider, ahead of Reading School's 54 and Highdown School and Sixth Form Centre's 40. Highdown, a non-selective academy, enters more Biology candidates than any of Reading's four independent schools - The Abbey School Reading (25), Leighton Park School (16), St Joseph's College (9) and Queen Anne's School (7) - and more than either of the two smaller academies, UTC Reading and The WREN School, which entered 13 each. Summed across all twelve, Reading's providers made 271 A-level Biology entries in 2024/25; that total is this page's own arithmetic, not a figure DfE publishes in one place.

The Abbey School Reading's row needs a sentence of its own. Its subjects-entered table carries three separate Biology rows: 25 at GCE A level, 6 at International Baccalaureate Higher Level and 3 at IB Standard Level. The IB entries are a different qualification altogether, run alongside the school's A-level programme, and should not be added to its 25 A-level entries or to the borough total above.

Two Reading Providers That No Longer Exist Under These Names

Two of the twelve schools behind the figures above have changed since the 2024/25 exam series, and a parent relying on either name today needs to know which kind of change it was.

St Joseph's College is recorded by the Department for Education's own school register as closed, with a closure date of 10 July 2026 and the reason given simply as Closure. The school's own website confirms the detail behind that entry: insolvency practitioners were appointed over St Joseph's College Reading on 14 July 2026, and the school's own words are that it “closes its doors after 132 years.” Its 9 A-level Biology entries in 2024/25, and its +0.5 progress score - the only WELL ABOVE AVERAGE banding among Reading's twelve providers that year - are its last published figures, not a description of a place still open for applications.

John Madejski Academy's change is a different kind entirely. It closed on 31 December 2024 under what the Department for Education calls a Fresh Start, and its successor, Hartland High School, opened the very next day, 1 January 2025, under the Greenshaw Learning Trust. This was a rebrand of an underperforming school, not a withdrawal of sixth-form provision from the site. Because the 2024/25 academic year ran mostly under the old name, its published results - including 10 A-level Biology entries, an 18.9 average point score and the weakest overall A-level progress score in Reading, -0.86, WELL BELOW AVERAGE - are filed against John Madejski Academy's now-closed record rather than Hartland High School's new one, which currently carries no 16-18 data of its own.

GCSE Entry Requirements for A-Level Biology at Kendrick and Reading School

Reading's two state grammar schools publish specific GCSE thresholds for A-level Biology, and both set the bar higher for sciences than for their other subjects. Kendrick School's Sixth Form Admission page states the general rule first - at least a grade 6 or B at GCSE in the subjects to be studied at AS/A-level - then carves out an exception: “apart from Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics which requires a 7 or grade A at GCSE.” A student meeting Kendrick's general grade-6 bar everywhere else still needs a 7 to take Biology.

Reading School's own course page for A-level Biology - which names its specification as OCR Biology A, code H420 - states its entry requirement as “GCSE grade 7 in Biology or grade 7 in both Science and Additional Science.” That second route refers to the school's own combined-science wording, quoted here exactly as published rather than restated in current GCSE terms.

We could not find a published, dated, Biology-specific GCSE entry grade for any of the other ten Reading providers on their own admissions pages in the course of this research. Where a school does not publish one, that is a gap in what is public, not evidence the school has no requirement at all.

Which Exam Boards Award A-Level Biology, and Which Does Reading School Enter?

Reading School's own specification page names its board and code directly: OCR Biology A, H420 for the full A-level and H020 for the AS, confirmed on OCR's own live qualification page. Its course description also states plainly that “the practical endorsement is reported separately” from the graded papers - more on that below.

Nationally, three other boards currently award A-level Biology. AQA's specification, code 7402, is a linear qualification first taught from September 2015, confirmed on AQA's own live specification page. Pearson Edexcel awards two distinct Biology A-levels: Biology A, run with a Salters-Nuffield context and coded 9BN0, and Biology B, coded 9BI0 - both first taught from September 2015 with first certification in 2017, confirmed by reading the specification PDFs themselves rather than the marketing pages, whose file names run the opposite way round from the codes inside them. Eduqas, WJEC's board for England, lists its own A-level Biology under Qual Code A400QS, with a corresponding AS code of B400QS, on its own live qualifications page.

Which of these a given Reading sixth form actually enters is set out in that school's own curriculum documents, and Reading School is the only one of the twelve where we found the board and code stated on a public page. A tutoring programme built around the wrong board's past papers is working from the wrong content, so this is worth checking directly with a school before assuming it.

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How Do Reading's A-Level Providers Compare Beyond Biology?

The figures above are Biology-specific. The Department for Education also publishes a whole-cohort picture for every provider - covering every A-level a student takes, not Biology alone - and it is worth reading alongside the entry counts rather than instead of them. Across Reading's state-funded schools and colleges, the average A-level result in 2024/25 was 37.73 points per entry, a grade B-, against 36.1 across all English schools and colleges, a different and larger population that Reading School's own DfE Compare page prints as the second comparator. Retention to the end of the main study programme ran at 95.3% across Reading against 93.1% across England's state-funded providers.

Reading School's own whole-cohort figures - grade A, 48.96 points per entry, 62.9% reaching AAB or higher and 99.0% retention from 195 students enrolled - sit at the top of that range in 2024/25. John Madejski Academy, now Hartland High School, sat at the other end: an 18.9 average point score and 20.0% retention from just 10 students enrolled to study mainly A levels. Both are whole-school figures, not a statement about either provider's Biology teaching specifically.

One label is worth checking carefully rather than assuming. DfE's own page states the average-result comparators explicitly - “Reading state-funded schools / colleges” and “England all schools/colleges” - and does the same for retention. Its progress-score comparator, by contrast, is printed as a bare “England” figure with no such qualifier anywhere in the visible page. We have not treated that -0.03 as a state-funded-only figure on this page, because the source itself does not say so; a page that borrows the label from a neighbouring column would be attaching a population to a number the source never gave it.

The Practical Endorsement: Separate From the Grade

A-level sciences carry a practical endorsement reported independently of the A*-E grade, and Reading School's own course page states this directly for its OCR specification: students sit three examination papers that make up the graded result - biological processes, biological diversity and unified biology - and “the practical endorsement is reported separately.” It is a pass or not-classified judgement on a set of assessed practical competencies, not a mark that is added to or subtracted from the written papers, and it does not appear inside the A*-E grade printed on a certificate.

How Should You Read These Reading A-Level Biology Figures?

Everything above describes cohorts and institutions, not a single student. A student working toward a grade 7 offer at Kendrick or Reading School needs a plan built around their own current grade and their own specification's papers, not a borough average. The figures do a narrower job: they say which Reading providers actually teach A-level Biology, how many students each one entered in 2024/25, and - as of 2026 - which two of the twelve no longer exist under the names that data was recorded against.

For the Key Stage 4 picture behind these same sixth forms, see our GCSE Biology tutors in Reading page, built on entirely separate DfE data - Reading's separate-sciences entry rate, not its post-16 results. Families choosing between subjects at sixth form may also want our A-level Maths tutors in Reading page, which covers the same twelve providers' Mathematics entries and their whole-cohort progress scores in full. Our A-level Biology tuition page covers the specification content itself, and our wider A-level tuition service covers the other subjects a Reading student is likely to be carrying alongside Biology. Students weighing a Natural Sciences or Engineering route that now sits behind the ESAT should also see our ESAT preparation page, and families earlier in the pipeline will find Reading's own entrance-exam landscape on our 11+ tuition in Reading page. Our Reading tutoring hub covers every level we teach in the borough.

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