Physics Tutor: the 2026 data behind GCSE and A-level physics

Summer 2026 gave physics 45,800 A-level entries and 170,583 at GCSE, and the regulator gives a plain reason the subject feels different: 40% of the A-level assessment must test Level 2 maths or above, against 10% for biology. This page sets out what the JCQ tables, the Ofqual conditions and the confirmed June 2026 AQA boundaries say — and what they do not say.

What did summer 2026 actually do to physics grades?

JCQ published the A-level tables on results day in August 2026 and the GCSE tables a week later, and physics appears in each of them more than once. That matters more than it sounds. At A level the tables carry an "All ages" band and a separate band for 18-year-olds, and the two do not agree. Across all ages, 45,800 UK candidates sat A-level physics; 11.52% took an A* and 32.47% an A* or A. Among the 41,570 candidates who were 18, the same two figures were 12.11% and 33.76%. If a site quotes you a physics top-grade rate without naming the band it came from, it has not opened the table.

The comparison parents ask for first is physics against everything else. Across all subjects and all ages, 906,425 A-level entries produced 28.5% at A*–A and 9.6% at A*, up from 882,653 entries and 28.3% in 2025. Physics beat both of the 2026 figures. That is not evidence that physics is marked kindly. It is evidence that the students who choose it have already been filtered twice — once by triple science at GCSE, once by the mathematics they need for Year 12 — so the entry is small and strong. Physics is about 5.1% of all UK A-level entries.

One number in that table deserves more attention than the A* rate: 95.71% of physics candidates across all ages came away with a grade. Failure is not the normal risk in this subject. Landing one or two grades below a conditional offer is. That changes what tuition is for. The useful question is almost never whether a child will pass; it is which specific marks separate the grade they are currently getting from the grade the offer requires, and our A-level tuition starts by finding those marks on real papers rather than re-teaching the specification from the beginning.

Why does physics feel harder than biology when my child is fine at maths?

Here is the fact that no other physics tuition page on the first page of results carries, and it answers the question better than any adjective can. The Department for Education's subject content for the science A levels sets a floor on how mathematical each science must be: "at least 10% level 2 or above mathematical skills for biology and psychology, 20% for chemistry and 40% for physics". Ofqual then writes the same weightings into the binding GCE Subject Level Conditions and Requirements for Science, which means they apply identically to AQA, OCR A, OCR B, Edexcel and WJEC.

At GCSE the same regulator sets physics at 30 per cent of the marks allocated to assessment objectives AO1 to AO3, against 20 per cent for chemistry and 10 per cent for biology. A child who is a secure grade 4 mathematician is therefore structurally exposed in GCSE physics in a way they are not in GCSE biology, and the exposure widens again if they carry the same weakness into A-level physics.

This also settles a claim that used to sit on this page and still sits on plenty of others: that one exam board is more mathematical than another. The regulator's minimum is identical everywhere. Any real difference between boards is a matter of question style and context, not of how much mathematics is examined, and choosing a board to dodge the maths is not an option that exists.

What the 40% does not mean is that physics is a maths course in disguise. The failure we see most often is not an inability to rearrange an equation. It is a student who can do every step in isolation and cannot decide which step the situation calls for: who has the algebra but not the modelling — which quantity is conserved, which direction is positive, whether the answer should be of the order of millimetres or kilometres. That judgement is teachable, and it is what a physics specialist spends most of the first few sessions on.

Where do the marks actually sit in the AQA A-level papers?

AQA is the largest board for A-level Physics, and its scheme of assessment is public, so a student can know before they walk in where the marks are. Papers 1 and 2 are 85 raw marks each. Paper 3 is 45 marks of practical and data-analysis work in Section A plus a 35-mark option in Section B. Those scale to a 250-mark total. AQA is explicit that "A-level grades will be based only on marks from written exams" — the practical endorsement, covered below, sits outside the grade entirely.

The genuinely useful part is the assessment-objective split, which is far more uneven than most students assume. AO1 is recall, AO2 is applying knowledge to a situation, and AO3 is analysing, interpreting and evaluating.

Read the AO3 column across. About 15% of Paper 2 tests analysis and evaluation, against roughly 32% of Paper 3. If a student keeps losing marks on "suggest an improvement to the method" or "explain whether the data support the conclusion", those marks are concentrated in one paper, and recovering them is a different activity from revising content. Paper 2, by contrast, is where applying knowledge dominates at about 53%, so a student who knows everything and freezes on an unfamiliar context is losing most of it there. That is a diagnosis a family can act on in a term. "Work harder at physics" is not.

Boards differ in structure, and not every specification splits its papers this way, so the first thing worth checking is which specification code appears on your child's exam timetable. The reasoning above transfers between boards; the paper numbers do not.

What is the practical endorsement, and what does "Not Classified" mean?

Almost no tuition site mentions the practical endorsement, and almost every parent of a Year 12 physicist should understand how it works. The Department for Education requires students taking A levels in biology, chemistry and physics to have carried out "a minimum of 12 practical activities, which will contribute towards the Practical Endorsement". Those activities are assessed by the student's own teachers against five Common Practical Assessment Criteria competencies.

Three consequences follow, and they surprise people. First, the endorsement contributes nothing to the A-level grade. Second, it is reported separately on the certificate, and there are only two outcomes: Pass, or, where the criteria are not met, Ofqual's condition is blunt — "the outcome reported on the certificate must be Not Classified". A student who quietly avoids practicals loses no marks; they acquire a line on their certificate that every admissions tutor can read. Third, this is policed. Awarding organisations must ensure each centre delivering practical science assessments receives a monitoring visit at least every two years, which is why schools are strict about the CPAC evidence records that students treat as a formality.

The endorsement carries no marks, but practical knowledge carries plenty. AQA states that "overall, at least 15% of the marks for all A-level Physics courses will require the assessment of practical skills", and the twelve AQA required practicals — from stationary waves on a string to the inverse-square law for gamma radiation — are examined directly in the written papers. Skipping the laboratory is not free.

One point of confusion this page used to create is worth clearing up here. AQA GCSE Physics has ten required practicals, not twelve. Twelve is the A-level minimum set by the Department for Education and common to every board. Families looking further ahead should also note that the written entrance tests some physics and engineering courses require are a separate exercise again, covered in our admissions test preparation pages.

What did a physics grade cost in June 2026?

AQA published its confirmed June 2026 grade boundaries on results day. They matter for one reason above all others: they say how many marks a grade actually cost this summer, which is the only honest way to turn a mock score into a prediction. A percentage in a school report cannot do it, because the paper it came from was not marked to the same scale.

At A level the boundary is set on the full 250-mark scale, and it varies according to which Section B option the school teaches.

This is where a page has to be careful. A year ago the equivalent table supported a tidy conclusion: the spread between the toughest and the most accessible A* was nine marks, Engineering Physics was hardest and Medical Physics softest, and it seemed to follow that the option a student picks in Year 12 is not purely a matter of interest. In June 2026 the spread is five marks, and Astrophysics, not Engineering Physics, sits at the top. The honest reading is the opposite of the tidy one. The ranking is unstable between series, the gap is narrow, and choosing an option to chase a kinder boundary is a bet on a pattern that did not survive one year. Choose the option the department teaches best.

Three things in that table matter for a tier conversation. Higher tier grade 4 came in at 67 marks out of 200. Foundation tier grade 5, the ceiling of that tier, cost 141. And the allowed grade 3 on Higher sat at 57. Those numbers, rather than a rule of thumb, are what a tier decision should be argued from.

Foundation or Higher? What the tiering rules really say

This page used to say something false, and it said it twice, so the correction belongs here in full. It claimed that OCR Gateway's Higher tier stops at grade 4, that an OCR candidate therefore has no grade 3 safety net, and that the tiering decision consequently carries more risk on that board than on AQA. That is wrong. The allowed grade 3 is not an AQA concession. It is an Ofqual condition binding on every awarding organisation. The GCSE Subject Level Conditions and Requirements for Single Science state that a learner who takes higher tier assessments "must be awarded a grade within the range of 4 to 9, or be unclassified", but that "if the mark achieved by such a Learner is a small number of marks below the 4/3 grade boundary, that Learner may be awarded a grade 3". Boards that publish the range as 9 to 4 are printing the targeted range, not the whole rule.

The second rule worth knowing is the overlap. Ofqual requires that at least 20 per cent of the marks available in each tier come from questions common to both tiers and targeted at grades 4 and 5. A borderline candidate sits a fifth of the same paper whichever tier they enter. The tier decision is not a choice between two different subjects; it is a choice about what the other four-fifths looks like.

The entry data suggests schools have largely made their minds up. In summer 2026, 86 per cent of GCSE physics entries in England were higher tier, behind chemistry on 87 per cent and far above mathematics and combined science, both on 39 per cent. The physics share has barely moved since 2022. Separate-science physics is, in practice, a higher-tier subject.

So what should a parent actually weigh? We will not pretend there is a published threshold, because there is not. The arithmetic that does exist is this. In June 2026 a Foundation candidate needed 141 out of 200, about 70.5 per cent of the paper, to reach the tier ceiling of grade 5, while a Higher candidate needed 67 out of 200, about 33.5 per cent, for a grade 4. Foundation asks a student to be accurate on accessible material across almost the whole paper. Higher asks them to pick up a third of a harder one. Our own working view, offered as ours and not as a statistic, is that a student clearing accessible material comfortably and running out of paper is usually better served by Higher, and one grinding towards the Foundation ceiling in every mock is not.

Is physics shrinking as a subject?

Ofqual publishes provisional entry figures for England in June, two months before JCQ publishes what was actually sat across the United Kingdom in August. They are different populations and should not be reconciled in a single sentence — Ofqual counts 161,305 GCSE physics entries in England, JCQ counts 170,583 sat across the UK — but the Ofqual series is the one that shows direction of travel over time.

GCSE physics entries in England peaked at 174,735 in summer 2024 and have fallen in each of the two years since, reaching 161,305 in 2026, down 7.7 per cent from the peak. Over the same period combined science rose from 926,750 to 951,510. Nothing in that data says physics got harder. It says fewer fourteen-year-olds are being put on the triple science route and more are taking the combined one.

At A level the direction is upward, but slowly. Physics entries in England grew 1.8 per cent to 42,765 in 2026, the slowest growth of the three sciences, with biology up 4.2 per cent and chemistry up 3.4 per cent, and physics has slipped to the eighth most popular A level, behind history. AS physics, meanwhile, is disappearing: 2,715 entries in 2026 against 3,015 in 2025, a fall of 9.9 per cent and the largest decrease of any AS subject. A family planning a Year 12 safety net in the form of an AS in physics should know the qualification is leaving schools.

The practical consequence for a family is quiet but real. A shrinking GCSE cohort taught in fewer and larger triple science sets, feeding a subject where specialist teachers have been scarce for years, means less individual attention at exactly the point where the mathematical demand steps up. That is the honest case for one-to-one help in physics, and it is an argument about supply rather than a claim about any particular child.

The GCSE physics gender gap — and what it does not prove

The JCQ GCSE table carries a gap that nobody competing on this search result has mentioned. In the all-ages band for summer 2026, 49.10% of boys taking GCSE physics reached grade 7 or above, against 42.89% of girls: a difference of 6.2 percentage points.

At A level the picture inverts. There the issue is not attainment, it is entry. Of the 45,800 A-level physics candidates across all ages, 34,946 were male and 10,854 female, which makes the subject 23.7% female. The female A* rate was 10.53% against 11.83% for males, a gap far smaller than the gap in who turns up at all.

We are not going to tell you what causes either number, because the tables do not say, and anyone who claims otherwise is guessing. What the figures do support is a narrow and practical point for a family choosing options. A girl who wants physics is not choosing a subject in which girls do badly. She is choosing one in which most of her A-level classmates will be boys, and where the attainment difference between the sexes at A level is small enough to be irrelevant to her individual decision. If the GCSE gap concerns you, interrogate the tier entry and the set she is in, both of which are visible and changeable, rather than a national percentage that is neither.

The same table gives the benchmark most parents actually want. Separate-science physics returned 46.11% at grade 7 or above, more than double the 21.95% recorded across all GCSE subjects, and 91.55% at grade 4 or above against 67.28% nationally. Measured against that cohort, a grade 6 in physics is not a weak result. It is a mid-table result inside a strong and self-selected field. Judge it against the physics column, never against the national average.

What a physics programme built on this data looks like

Everything above is public. What a tutor adds is sequence: which of those facts applies to this child, this term, and in what order.

We open every physics placement with a diagnostic on real past papers rather than a conversation about confidence, because the published weightings make the diagnosis specific. A student haemorrhaging marks on evaluation questions needs method and data work, not more content revision. A student who knows the content and stalls on unfamiliar contexts needs application practice. A student whose algebra collapses under time pressure is meeting the 40% mathematical weighting head-on, and needs the mathematics rebuilt inside physics contexts rather than in a separate maths lesson, which is why we often pair physics with support in other subjects where the same weakness is showing.

Specialist tutors who studied physics and the physical sciences at leading universities take the A-level work. GCSE work is matched to the specification code on the child's own timetable, because tier, boundaries and required practical lists all differ between boards. For sixth-form families the physics programme is planned alongside the wider 16-plus route rather than bolted on in Year 13, and the practical endorsement is checked at the start of the course rather than discovered in the summer.

We will not promise a grade. The JCQ tables show that 95.71% of A-level physics candidates already achieve one. The work sits in the distance between the grade a student currently holds and the grade an offer requires, and that distance is measured in marks on named papers.

Five questions to take to your child's physics teacher

None of this is useful sitting on a website. These are the questions that turn it into a conversation with the school, and every one of them has a factual answer a department can give in a minute.

First: which specification are we entered for, and what is its code? Everything else, from boundaries to papers to required practicals, hangs on the answer. Second, at GCSE: which tier, and on what evidence? Ask for the mock mark out of the paper total, then set it against the June 2026 boundaries above rather than against a percentage in a report. Third, at A level: is the practical endorsement on track, and is the CPAC evidence record complete? A Not Classified is avoidable, and it is permanent.

Fourth: which paper are the lost marks on, and against which assessment objective? Departments track this and rarely volunteer it. Fifth: which Section B option is taught, and when in the two years is it taught? The June 2026 boundaries put only five marks between the hardest and the most accessible A*, which is small enough that how well the option is taught matters far more than which one it is.

If the answers come back vague, that is itself information. Families in that position usually want an independent read on where a child actually stands, and that is the point at which a conversation with us earns its place — earlier in the year than most people book it, because the mathematical demand in A-level physics compounds if it is left alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

AQA vs OCR: GCSE and A-Level Physics Specifications Compared

Every UK physics tutor should be working from the actual specification your child's school follows, not a generic revision list. The two most widely used boards for GCSE and A-level Physics are AQA (specification codes 8463 at GCSE and 7408 at A-level) and OCR, which runs two separate suites: Gateway Science (J249 at GCSE, H556 at A-level) and Twenty First Century Science (J259 at GCSE, H557 — Advancing Physics — at A-level). The structural differences between them affect how a tutor should plan revision, particularly around tiering and required practicals.

The 10 AQA GCSE Physics Required Practicals (Not 12)

A common claim in physics revision content is that AQA GCSE Physics has 12 required practicals. It does not. The current AQA specification (8463) lists exactly 10 required practical activities, verified directly against AQA's published practical assessment section. Practicals 2 and 9 are physics-only, meaning GCSE Combined Science students never carry them out — they complete the other 8.

OCR Gateway Physics A (J249) takes a different approach: rather than 10 fixed practicals, it requires a minimum of 8 practical activities chosen flexibly across 8 Practical Activity Groups (PAGs), so long as students use every apparatus and technique listed for that PAG at least once. Both boards examine practical knowledge at a minimum of 15% of total marks — there is no separate practical exam at GCSE on either specification. Our tutors work through the exact practical each student's school is teaching that term, since exam boards frequently set questions asking students to evaluate a method, identify a control variable, or explain a source of error from one of these specific investigations.

Physics Curriculum FAQs

Sources: AQA GCSE Physics 8463 practical assessment, AQA grade boundaries, June 2025, OCR Gateway Physics A J249.