For OCR Biology B, September 2026 is the final new Year 12 start — and the AS route inside it runs on its own, earlier clock.
Book a Free ConsultationOCR AS and A Level Biology B (Advancing Biology) — specification codes H022 for the AS and H422 for the A-level — is being withdrawn, and OCR's own qualification page names September 2026 as the final date any school can start a new Year 12 cohort on it. Inside that timeline sits a second, earlier deadline: AS Biology B's own final assessment opportunity is June 2027, a full year before H422's June 2028 cut-off for the A-level.
Already know which OCR Biology route your child's school has chosen? Our expert OCR Biology tutors work with Year 12 students on both H420 and H422, whether they are sitting the full A-level or an AS-only year, and build the term around the specification your child is actually on.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppYes, by OCR's own account. Its qualification page for Biology B (Advancing Biology) states: "Following the review of our suite of general qualifications, we will stop offering our AS Level and A Level Biology B (Advancing Biology) (H022/H422) qualifications. The final first teach date will be September 2026." A Year 12 cohort beginning the course this September is therefore the last one OCR will accept onto H422 — not the last to sit the exam, which follows a separate timetable, but the last to start the two-year course at all.
OCR Biology A, specification H420, is a different qualification and does not appear in the same withdrawal notice. Checked against OCR's live A-level subject list on 7 September 2026, H420 carries no withdrawal notice of its own and continues to be offered alongside the wider Biology A route. A school moving a Year 12 cohort away from H422 is moving them onto a genuinely different specification, with its own components and its own weightings — the full comparison between H420 and H422 is set out on our A-level Biology guide, which is where that detail belongs rather than being repeated here.
For a family weighing this in the first weeks of the September 2026 intake, the practical point is not whether OCR will honour a place already taken up — it will, right through to the final H422 sitting in June 2028 — but whether the school intends to run the specification at all beyond this cohort. Because September 2026 is the final first-teach date, no school can start a fresh Year 12 group on H422 the following September, which means the Year 12 cohort starting in September 2026 is also the last one for which a school could plausibly still be deciding between H420 and H422. A student already placed on H422 is unaffected by that wider question; a younger sibling two years behind is not.
It is a decision that has to be made in Year 12, not deferred to Year 13, because AS Biology B is a standalone qualification with its own final assessment opportunity: June 2027, a full year ahead of June 2028 for the A-level. OCR's subject update names both dates and attaches the same condition to each: "There will not be a resit opportunity after the final assessment opportunity." A student entered for the AS award alone is working to the earlier of the two — missing it is not something a Year 13 resit can fix, because there is no further sitting of H022 after June 2027 at all.
OCR gives a plain reason for retiring the standalone AS route rather than only the full A-level: "The demand for AS Levels nationally has declined significantly over the past decade, after the qualifications were decoupled from A Levels and no longer mandatory as part of an A Level." Once an AS result stopped being required to award the full qualification, fewer schools entered students for it as a stage in its own right, and OCR is now withdrawing several standalone AS qualifications on that basis rather than for any change specific to Biology.
What this means in practice is that a school still teaching H422 to this Year 12 cohort has already made, or is about to make, a decision about whether AS entry happens at all. Asking the school directly which way they have gone is worth doing now, because June 2027 is closer than it looks against a two-year course that only finished starting.
No, and this is the part of the qualification structure most likely to be misread by a family watching a full year of practical work in the lab. OCR's specification-at-a-glance page is explicit that the practical endorsement is not folded into the written papers at all: "Students must complete all components (01, 02, 03, and 04) to be awarded the A Level in Biology B (Advancing Biology)." Component 04 is the practical endorsement itself, reported separately from the grade as Pass or Not-classified.
AS Biology B is not a subset of those four components with the last two simply skipped — it is assessed on two components only. OCR's own June 2025 grade boundary tables list H022 against components 01 (Foundations of biology) and 02 (Biology in depth), with no 03 or 04 line for the AS award at all. (OCR's grade-boundary PDF did not render as extractable text for this page; the same two-component reading was checked against three independent copies of the same document on 7 September 2026, all showing identical rows.) The practical endorsement, in other words, is not something an AS-only candidate can earn or miss — it is not part of the qualification they sat, in the way it is part of the four-component A-level.
For a family, the practical consequence is that a strong AS result in June 2027 will not carry a Pass or Not-classified line onto the certificate, because there is no certificate carrying it — that only happens for a student who goes on to complete components 03 and 04 as part of the full A-level in June 2028.
Working out whether your child's school is entering them for the AS award in June 2027, or running straight through to the A-level? Our OCR Biology tutors help Year 12 and Year 13 students prepare for whichever route the school has set, with a plan built around the actual components H022 or H420/H422 will be marked on.
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Three OCR-set dates now govern this cohort, and none of them move for an individual student:
| Date | What happens | Resit position |
|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | Final first-teach date for both H022 (AS) and H422 (A-level) — the last Year 12 cohort OCR will start on the qualification | Not applicable — this is a start date, not a sitting |
| June 2027 | Final assessment opportunity for AS Biology B, H022 | No resit opportunity after this sitting |
| June 2028 | Final assessment opportunity for the full A-level, H422 | No resit opportunity after this sitting |
Source: OCR qualification withdrawals subject update, checked 7 September 2026.
Two questions follow from that table, and both are worth putting to the school directly rather than assuming an answer. The first is whether this Year 12 cohort is being entered for the standalone AS award in June 2027 at all, since that decision has to be acted on well before the exam and cannot be reversed once the window has passed. The second is what happens to a student who needs to resit after either cut-off — because neither date carries a further attempt on the same specification, a resit after June 2027 or June 2028 means moving onto whatever OCR Biology specification is still current at that point, most likely H420, with its own components and its own weightings.
We start from the specification code on the exam entry, not from "Biology" as a generic subject, because H022, H420 and H422 are marked on different components with different weightings. For a Year 12 student on H422, the first session is spent establishing which route the school has actually chosen — AS entry in June 2027, straight through to the A-level in June 2028, or a possible move onto H420 — because the answer changes what a term of tutoring should cover and when.
Our tutors are specialist tutors who teach the board and the specification in front of them, several of them examiners or practising scientists, and we cover OCR's Biology A and Biology B routes at both AS and A-level alongside AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas and WJEC. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades, and we are rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews. If your child is still working through GCSE content, our GCSE Biology guide sets out the triple and combined routes that feed into A-level study; our wider Biology tutor service covers GCSE and A-level together, and the A-level tutoring hub covers every other subject at this level.
Whatever your child's school has decided on AS entry, our OCR Biology tutors build the Year 12 term around it — from a single AS sitting in June 2027 to the full three-paper route through to June 2028.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppNo. OCR's own qualification page states plainly: "The final first teach date will be September 2026." A Year 12 cohort that begins the two-year H422 course in September 2026 is the last one OCR will accept onto the qualification; a school starting a new intake in a later September could not enter them for H422 at all. This is separate from the exam cut-off — the final assessment opportunity for the A-level itself is June 2028, for students already partway through the course by then.
Yes, and it falls a year earlier. OCR's subject update lists H022's final assessment opportunity as June 2027, against June 2028 for the A-level, H422. Both carry the same condition: "There will not be a resit opportunity after the final assessment opportunity." A Year 12 student entered for the AS award alone is working to the earlier of the two dates, not the one usually quoted for the full course.
No — it is not part of the AS award to begin with. OCR's specification requires all four components, 01 to 04, for the full A-level, and component 04 is the practical endorsement. AS Biology B is assessed on components 01 and 02 only, so there is no 03 or 04 for an AS-only student to complete. The endorsement is something a Year 13 A-level candidate is awarded Pass or Not-classified on; it never applies to a two-component AS entry.
No. OCR states, against H022's June 2027 final assessment opportunity, that "there will not be a resit opportunity after the final assessment opportunity." A Year 12 student who sits and misses their target grade in the AS award in June 2027 cannot resit the same qualification afterwards; any further attempt would have to be on a different, continuing specification.
OCR gives a national decline in demand, not a subject-specific reason. Its own subject update states: "The demand for AS Levels nationally has declined significantly over the past decade, after the qualifications were decoupled from A Levels and no longer mandatory as part of an A Level." Once schools no longer needed an AS result to award a full A-level, OCR began withdrawing several standalone AS qualifications, of which Biology B is one.
No. OCR's withdrawal notice names H022 and H422 — Biology B — specifically, and H420, the separate Biology A specification, is absent from it. Checked against OCR's live A-level subject list on 7 September 2026, H420 continues to be offered with no withdrawal notice attached. A school moving a Year 12 cohort off H422 has H420 available as a continuing route, though it is a different specification with different components and weightings.
Two questions, both time-critical. First, whether the school intends to enter students for the standalone AS award in June 2027 or run straight through to the A-level in June 2028 — the AS route needs its own decision now, not in Year 13. Second, given September 2026 is OCR's final first-teach date for H422, what the school's plan is if a student needs to resit after either cut-off, since neither date carries a further resit opportunity on the same specification.
Checked 7 September 2026: specification codes, first-teach and final-assessment dates and the practical endorsement structure were verified against OCR's own qualification page and subject-update notice. Last updated 7 September 2026.
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