Year 12 AQA A-Level Further Maths: AS 7366 in 2026

AQA AS Further Mathematics 7366 is AQA's Year 12 Further Maths qualification, taught alongside a student's AS or A-level Mathematics course, and its applied half is examined as two separate 40-mark booklets drawn from the codes 7366/2D, 7366/2M and 7366/2S. Those two booklets are completed inside one session of 1 hour 30 minutes and carry 50% of the AS award, against 33⅓% for the same applied choice in A-level Further Mathematics 7367.

Every AS option is a cut-down version of the A-level one rather than a separate, lighter syllabus.

The two booklet codes a Year 12 AQA Further Maths entry carries

AQA's key dates for AS Further Mathematics list four separate exams: 7366/1, 7366/2D, 7366/2M and 7366/2S. For the June 2027 series, Paper 1 (7366/1) sits on the afternoon of 10 May 2027 for 1 hour 30 minutes, and each of the three optional booklet codes sits on the afternoon of 14 May 2027, also for 1 hour 30 minutes.

A candidate is entered for two of those three optional codes. AQA's specification is explicit that “Students must study two of these options” — mechanics, statistics and discrete mathematics — and the question papers themselves show how that plays out in the exam room. The June 2023 Paper 2 Discrete booklet opens by telling the candidate: “You must ensure you have the other optional Question Paper/Answer Book for which you are entered (either Mechanics or Statistics). You will have 1 hour 30 minutes to complete both papers.” The Statistics booklet carries the mirror instruction, naming Discrete or Mechanics.

Each of those booklets states its own total. The June 2023 Discrete booklet reads “The maximum mark for this paper is 40”, and its Statistics and Mechanics counterparts are the same size. Two 40-mark booklets make the 80 marks AQA attributes to Paper 2 as a whole.

AQA takes a single qualification entry for 7366 — its specification says “You only need to make one entry for each qualification – this will cover all the question papers” — but which two optional booklets a student sits still has to be recorded, because the three are examined as separate components on the timetable. The useful question to put to a school is therefore not whether a child is taking Further Maths, but which two of discrete, mechanics and statistics they are entered for.

Why the applied pair is half of the AS and only a third of the A-level

AS 7366 has two components of equal weight. Paper 1 is a written exam of 1 hour 30 minutes carrying 80 marks and 50% of the AS; the applied session is the same length, the same 80 marks and the same 50%. AQA scales neither, so the total scaled mark for the qualification is 160.

A-level Further Mathematics 7367 distributes its applied content quite differently. Its three papers are each 2 hours, 100 marks and 33⅓% of the A-level, and its optional booklets run to 50 marks apiece rather than 40, sat two at a time inside a 2 hour session. So the same choice between mechanics, statistics and discrete governs half of what a Year 12 student is marked on, and a third of what a Year 13 student is marked on.

The assessment objectives move in the same direction. AQA weights AO1, the use and application of standard techniques, at 65% of AS Paper 1 but 55% of Paper 2, and AO3, solving problems in mathematical and other contexts, at 15% of Paper 1 against 25% of Paper 2. The applied session is therefore both the larger share of the qualification than it will later be and the more problem-led of the two papers.

None of that makes the applied booklets harder than the compulsory paper. It does mean that a Year 12 revision plan splitting time evenly between “the pure” and “the options” is matching the marks exactly, which is not the habit most students bring from AS or A-level Mathematics, where the applied content is a smaller slice.

How far each of AQA's three options actually goes at AS

AQA numbers every piece of content in its specifications — MA1, SB3, DG7 and so on — and uses the same labels in the AS and A-level documents. Counting those labels in AQA's AS specification (Version 1.2, 11 January 2018) and in its A-level counterpart, and checking the AS figures again against AQA's live subject-content pages, gives a precise measure of how much of each option a Year 12 student meets.

Mechanics stops one subsection short. AQA's AS option runs from MA: Dimensional analysis to MD: Circular motion, and ME: Centres of mass and moments appears only in the A-level document. Statistics stops two short, and not the two you would expect from the ordering: the AS option covers SA to SE and then jumps to SH: Confidence intervals, leaving SF: Exponential distribution and SG: Inference – one sample t-distribution to Year 13. AQA keeps the A-level letter SH at AS even though it is the sixth subsection there rather than the eighth, which is a small sign of how deliberately the AS list was carved out of the A-level one.

Discrete mathematics is the interesting case. It is the only option to reach every one of its seven named subsections at AS, from DA: Graphs through to DG: Binary operations, so a student looking at the headings alone would conclude they had covered the whole thing. By content statement it is the most heavily thinned of the three: 31 of 47, with six of the sixteen held back sitting inside DG alone, as DG7 to DG12.

These are counts of AQA's own numbered statements, and they measure coverage rather than difficulty. A single statement can occupy a fortnight of teaching or twenty minutes, so the figures say how much of an option's territory the AS reaches, not how hard any of it is.

Why switching an option between Year 12 and Year 13 costs more than continuing one

Set the AS and A-level lists side by side and one property stands out: across all three applications, every content statement in the AS option also appears in the A-level option, and not one appears only at AS. The AS option is a strict subset, not an overlapping alternative.

That has a direct consequence for the Year 13 year. Continuing with the same applied pair adds 9 statements in mechanics, 10 in statistics and 16 in discrete mathematics — real work, but work that builds on named subsections the student already knows. Dropping an option and picking up a different one instead starts that option from nothing, because none of the AS study transfers.

AQA designs for the first of those routes rather than the second. Its specification says plainly that “There is overlapping content in the AS and A-level Further Mathematics specifications. This helps you teach the AS and A-level together”, and describes the AS itself as “designed to be taken over one or two years”. In practice the decision sits with the centre: AQA states that “There are no previous learning requirements” and that any entry requirements “are at the discretion of schools and colleges”.

For a family, the useful question to a head of maths is therefore not which options exist but which two the department teaches, and whether the same two continue into Year 13. A department that teaches statistics and mechanics for AS and then moves its A-level cohort to discrete would be asking students to start an option twice.

When the two codes stop being changeable: AQA's entry calendar

The option pair is a teaching decision until the February entries deadline and an administrative one after it. AQA's entries table sets the pattern: for the June 2026 series, basedata became available on 21 November 2025, the entries deadline was 21 February 2026, and the deadline for very late entries, amendment fees payable and withdrawal refunds was 21 April 2026. AQA adds that “If you submit an entry after the deadline date, you will be charged a late entry fee.”

That February date is when the two booklet codes become a matter of record rather than intention. Amendments are possible for roughly two months afterwards, but they attract a fee, and by then the teaching is largely done. AQA had published no equivalent row for a June 2027 series on that table when it was checked on 26 September 2026 — the latest row shown was the November 2026 series — so the exact 2027 dates are worth asking an exams officer for rather than assuming they repeat.

The scale of the decision is easy to underestimate. Ofqual's provisional entries for summer 2026 record 4,750 Year 12 entries for AS Further Mathematics in England, out of 5,980 AS Further Maths entries in total. Those are national figures across every awarding body, supplied by the exam boards, rounded to the nearest 5 and counted as at 15 April 2026, so they describe the whole AS Further Maths cohort rather than AQA's share of it.

Working with a Year 12 AQA Further Maths tutor on the pair your school entered

Our expert A-level Further Maths tutors help Year 12 students across the UK with AQA's AS 7366, and the first thing we establish is which two booklet codes the school has entered. A student on 7366/2M and 7366/2S is working towards a different applied session from one on 7366/2D and 7366/2S, and a general Further Maths programme serves neither of them well.

The compulsory side is common to everyone. AQA prints 38 numbered content statements across sections A to H for AS Paper 1, from A: Proof through to H: Hyperbolic functions, against 78 across sections A to J in the A-level document. Work on that paper is the same whichever pair a school teaches, and it is the one component every AS Further Maths candidate sits.

Because AQA sets no previous learning requirement beyond recommending “the skills and knowledge associated with a GCSE Mathematics or equivalent”, students arrive at Further Maths from very different starting points, and several are carrying AS or A-level Mathematics at the same time — AQA notes that AS Further Mathematics “can be taught alongside the AS Mathematics qualification”. Sessions that treat the two as one workload, rather than two unrelated subjects, tend to be the ones that hold up in the summer.

91% of Leading Tuition students reach their target grades, and we are rated 4.8 out of 5 from 59 reviews on Trustpilot, read on 3 October 2026. For the full A-level picture — the three papers of 7367, its grade boundaries and its exam-room rules — see our page on AQA A-Level Further Maths, or compare the option structures across every board on A-Level Further Maths.

Frequently asked questions about Year 12 AQA AS Further Maths 7366