Year 12 OCR A-Level Maths: H230 and H630 in 2026

AS Level Mathematics A (H230) and AS Level Mathematics B, MEI (H630) are OCR’s two Advanced Subsidiary qualifications in Mathematics, separately accredited as 603/0933/7 and 603/0991/X. Both documents stand at Version 3.1, dated August 2026. Each is examined in two written papers of 1 hour 30 minutes, worth 75 marks apiece on H230 and 70 on H630.

Read side by side on 26 September 2026, those two documents and the pages OCR publishes about them do not always agree with each other. This page sets out where they differ and which document governs.

What OCR’s AS Mathematics A specification says about calculators, in three places that disagree

This is not the question of which machines are permitted in an examination hall. That is a national rule, identical whichever A-level maths specification a school enters, and our A-Level Maths page sets out the permitted and banned categories across the boards. The question here is narrower and stranger: what does one OCR document, the AS Level Mathematics A specification, tell a Year 12 family it expects? It answers three times, and the three answers are not the same.

Source: OCR, AS Level Mathematics A specification, H230, Version 3.1 (August 2026), PDF pages 4, 11 and 45, read 26 September 2026.

All three agree on the first requirement, “an iterative function such as an ANS key”, and all three point to the same governing rulebook: the JCQ Instructions for Conducting Examinations, which OCR notes is published annually. The divergence is entirely about the normal distribution, and it matters because the normal distribution is not an AS content statement in that document at all. Reading H230 Version 3.1 from cover to cover, the phrase occurs only in those two calculator paragraphs. The AS statistics content is listed as Statistical Sampling, Data Presentation and Interpretation, Probability, Statistical Distributions and Statistical Hypothesis Testing, and the Statistical Distributions entry does not name it.

So section 3b asks for a calculator feature that supports statistics the AS itself does not set, while section 2c asks for the same feature and says openly why — it is wanted “for subsequent A level”. Section 1, the specification’s own summary of its assessment, names the binomial and stops there.

The parallel document behaves differently. OCR’s AS Level Mathematics B (MEI) specification, H630, also Version 3.1 of August 2026, states the requirement once, in its own section 2c: “An iterative function such as an ANS key. The ability to compute summary statistics and access probabilities from the binomial distribution.” There is no second statement anywhere in the document and no mention of the normal distribution in the requirement. A Year 12 student on H630 is therefore told one thing once; a student on H230 is told three things.

For a family buying a machine at the start of Year 12, the practical reading is that the strictest of the three statements is the safe one, and section 2c supplies the argument for it without needing the other two: the normal distribution arrives with the A-level whether or not the AS examines it, so a calculator that can return normal probabilities will be needed by Year 13 in any case. Whichever machine is bought, H230 attaches its own condition to using it: “in each question paper, learners are expected to support their answers with appropriate working.”

One caution on sourcing. Both statements above were read from the specification PDFs themselves rather than from any summary page, because OCR revises these documents without changing the specification code on the cover: H230 has been H230 since first assessment in 2018, and the document behind it has been reissued several times since, most recently as Version 3.1 in August 2026. Check the version line on the cover of whatever copy your school is using before assuming it matches the one quoted here.

Do OCR’s website and its H630 specification say the same thing about numerical methods at AS?

On this one topic, on one of the two routes, they do not. The two sources are both OCR’s and both current, and a Year 12 student on Mathematics B (MEI) gets a different answer depending on which one is open.

The first source is OCR’s specification-at-a-glance page for Mathematics B (MEI). That page carries two panels, one for the A-level and one for the AS; the AS panel is the one holding the two 70-mark, 1 hour 30 minute components and the link to download the AS specification. Read on 26 September 2026, its content overview lists, under Area 1: Pure mathematics, the topics Proof, Algebra, Functions, Graphs, Coordinate geometry, Sequences and series, Trigonometry, Exponentials and logarithms, Calculus, Numerical methods and Vectors.

The second source is the document that panel links to: OCR’s AS Level Mathematics B (MEI) specification, H630, Version 3.1 of August 2026, downloaded and read the same day. It carries no numerical-methods content statements. Searching the whole document for the vocabulary those statements would have to use returns nothing at all: no change-of-sign method, no fixed-point iteration, no Newton-Raphson, no trapezium rule, no numerical integration. The words “numerical methods” do appear once, in section 2c, where OCR writes that learners “should also use spreadsheet software to investigate numerical methods for solving equations and for modelling in statistics and mechanics” — a statement about classroom technology, not an assessable content requirement.

The obvious explanation would be that the AS panel is simply the A-level list shown twice, and that is worth ruling out before anything is made of it. It is not. The same AS panel restricts the mechanics content to “Models and quantities, Kinematics in one dimension, Forces, Newton’s laws of motion”, where the A-level panel on the identical page adds kinematics in two dimensions, projectiles and rigid bodies. The AS panel has been written for the AS. Numerical methods is a single entry inside a list that is otherwise doing exactly what it should.

The comparison that makes the discrepancy visible is with OCR’s other maths route, where the two sources agree with each other. On the Mathematics A page, the AS panel lists Proof, Algebra and functions, Coordinate geometry in the x-y plane, Sequences and series, Trigonometry, Exponentials and logarithms, Differentiation, Integration and Vectors, and stops. Numerical methods is not there, and it is not in the H230 specification either. Two OCR sources, one answer.

For a Year 12 family the practical point is about precedence rather than blame. The specification is the assessable document — it is the one accredited by Ofqual under 603/0991/X and the one examiners write papers against — and the at-a-glance page is a summary of it. Where a summary and the document it summarises differ, the sensible step is to ask the school which of the two its scheme of work is built on, and to re-read the H630 document at the date you read it, because OCR revises both. The August 2026 revision to H630 touched exactly this part of the specification: its own change log records edits to sections 1b and 2b and the insertion of a new section 5e, “Assessment of pre-release material”, which the parallel H230 document did not receive.

How OCR’s two AS entry tables invert each other

Each AS specification ends with an entry table: the entry code a centre uses, and the components that sit under it. The two tables are worth reading next to one another, because the component numbers carry opposite meanings.

OCR’s H230 table reads: “H230 Mathematics A 01 Pure Mathematics and Statistics External Assessment 02 Pure Mathematics and Mechanics External Assessment.” The H630 table reads: “H630 Mathematics B (MEI) 01 Pure Mathematics and Mechanics External Assessment 02 Pure Mathematics and Statistics External Assessment.” Same two applied strands, opposite component numbers.

Source: OCR, AS Level Mathematics A (H230) and AS Level Mathematics B, MEI (H630) specifications, both Version 3.1 (August 2026), read 26 September 2026.

The consequence is small and entirely practical. “Paper 1” is not a portable phrase between these two routes: a revision plan, a mock timetable or a set of notes built around Paper 1 on one specification describes the other specification’s Paper 2. A student who changes school mid-year between the two routes, or a household with one child on each, inherits that inversion silently, because nothing on either paper announces that the numbering runs the other way.

The pre-release large data set follows the statistics content rather than the number, which is why it lands in different places. H230’s specification says component 01 assesses Pure Mathematics and Statistics “in two separate sections of approximately 50 and 25 marks respectively”, and that “some of the assessment items in the Statistics section will be set in the context of the pre-release large data set”. H630’s says its pre-release material “will be relevant to some (but not all) of the questions in component 02”. Neither route hands a candidate the data itself: H230 states that learners “will NOT have a printout of the large data set available to them in the examination but selected data or summary statistics from the data set may be provided within the examination paper”, and H630 says the same of its pre-release material.

The two routes also describe their papers differently, which shows up the moment a student looks at a mark scheme. H230 prints its papers in sections, roughly 50 marks of pure mathematics followed by 25 of the applied strand, and OCR states flatly that “all examinations have a duration of 90 minutes”. H630 describes each component by the content areas it draws on rather than by printed sections. On both routes, both components are marked “External Assessment” in the entry table, so there is no coursework and nothing internally assessed at AS on either.

Year 13 changes the shape again on both routes, and our Year 13 OCR A-Level Maths page covers the H240 and H640 papers, past-paper access and the large data set arrangements that apply to the full A-level.

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What a June 2027 AS entry commits a school to, and what the award is worth

An AS is not a progress check inside the A-level. It is a qualification in its own right, accredited separately — 603/0933/7 for H230, 603/0991/X for H630 — entered under its own entry code, and certificated on its own scale. What OCR’s administrative sections fix about it is worth knowing before a sixth form commits a cohort to sitting it.

The taught size is identical on the two routes. AS Mathematics A states that “the total qualification time for AS Level in Mathematics A is 180 hours. The total guided learning time is 180 hours”, and AS Mathematics B (MEI) states the same two figures for itself. Total qualification time is OCR’s measure of everything a learner is expected to spend, guided learning plus preparation, study and assessment, so a route choice between H230 and H630 is not a choice about how much time the year takes.

The grade scale is also identical, and both documents give it in the same words: “AS Level qualifications are graded on the scale: A, B, C, D, E, where A is the highest. Learners who fail to reach the minimum standard for E will be Unclassified (U). Only subjects in which grades A to E are attained will be recorded on certificates.” Unclassified is not a grade that appears on a certificate; it is the absence of one.

The administrative commitment sits with the centre rather than the family. Both components are external assessments, so there is nothing to submit and no internal deadline to miss, but the head of centre signs an annual declaration to JCQ — OCR describes it as “part of the annual NCN update, conducted in the autumn term” — confirming the centre meets the requirements in the specification. The practical version of that for a parent is simple: whether a Year 12 student sits an AS in June 2027 is a decision the school takes and enters, not one a household makes independently, so it is a question to ask at the first parents’ evening rather than in the spring.

Families do ask whether the AS itself is going away, because OCR has been withdrawing AS qualifications: its notice “Important: Withdrawal of selected Cambridge OCR general qualifications”, first published 19 March 2026 and last updated 12 May 2026, names the awards affected and their final assessment opportunities, among them “H033 Cambridge OCR Level 3 Advanced Subsidiary GCE in Chemistry B (Salters) 601/5446/9 June 2027”, and gives OCR’s reason as “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.” A full-text search of that notice on 26 September 2026 returned no match for H230, H630, 603/0933/7 or 603/0991/X.

Chemistry families reading that notice for their own subject will find the detail on our Year 12 OCR A-Level Chemistry page, and the route-level differences between OCR’s two maths specifications are set out on the OCR A-Level Maths page.

Frequently asked questions about Year 12 OCR A-Level Maths