Year 13 Edexcel A-Level Physics (9PH0) in 2027

Edexcel A-Level Physics (9PH0) is a linear Level 3 qualification assessed by three written papers and a separately reported Science Practical Endorsement. The Endorsement needs evidence of competence in all 12 practical techniques listed in Appendix 5c of Pearson’s specification. Eleven of those 12 are covered by core practicals 1 to 8, the eight a student meets in the AS-year content. The twelfth, use of ionising radiation, has exactly one core practical behind it: Core Practical 15.

Eleven of the Twelve Endorsement Techniques Are Already Reachable Before Year 13 — the Twelfth Is Not

Pearson gives the Science Practical Endorsement its own paper code, 9PH0/04. It is internally assessed and externally monitored, and the specification is explicit that it “will not contribute to the overall grade for this qualification, but the result will be recorded on the student’s certificate”. How it is actually earned turns on two numbers that look alike and are not.

The first is a floor on volume. Pearson: “Students must carry out a minimum of 12 practical activities which, together, meet the requirements of Appendices 5b … and 5c from the prescribed subject content.” The second is about coverage: Appendix 5c lists 12 named practical techniques, and “evidence must be provided for the 12 practical techniques listed in Appendix 5c through a minimum of 12 core practical activities”. Twelve activities is a quantity; twelve techniques is a checklist. Meeting the first does not guarantee the second.

The other thing to hold is that the A-level and the AS are different documents. The 9PH0 specification (Issue 3, November 2018) prescribes 16 core practical activities. The AS specification, 8PH0 (Issue 2, March 2016), prescribes 8, and it numbers them 1 to 8 exactly as the A-level does. Core practicals 9 to 16 appear only in the A-level document. Our page on Year 12 Edexcel A-level Physics covers how the two qualifications differ as entries. Here the point is narrower: the eight practicals a student has most likely already done are a known, fixed set, so Pearson’s own mapping can be read to say precisely which techniques that set evidences.

Appendix 5d of the specification is that mapping: a grid with the 16 core practicals down the side and the 12 techniques across the top. Reading it row by row gives the table below. The right-hand column asks one question of each technique — is it evidenced by any core practical numbered 1 to 8?

Eleven of the twelve are covered. Technique 12 is not, and it is the only one that is not. Pearson’s wording for it is “Use ionising radiation, including detectors.” No practical in the AS-year set involves a radioactive source: those eight cover free fall, resistivity, e.m.f. and internal resistance, viscosity, the Young modulus, the speed of sound, a vibrating string, and the wavelength of light through a diffraction grating. There is nothing for a Geiger counter to do in any of them.

Technique 11 is worth a second look. It is covered, but by a single route: core practical 7, the vibrating-string investigation, is the only one of the first eight Pearson ticks for ICT and data logging. A department that abridged it, or ran it without the data capture, has a second technique outstanding — and that one is easy to miss, because it looks covered on paper.

Core Practical 15 Is the Only Practical Pearson Ticks Against Technique 12

Appendix 5d exists precisely to answer this. Pearson introduces it as showing “how each core practical activity, listed in the content, maps to the required practical techniques in Appendix 5c: Use of apparatus and techniques”. Across all 16 rows and all 12 columns the technique-12 column carries one mark, and it is on the row for Core Practical 15: “Investigate the absorption of gamma radiation by lead”.

That is consistent with the titles themselves. Core Practical 15 is the only one of the sixteen whose title names a radioactive source. It sits in Topic 11, Nuclear Radiation, and Topic 11 does not exist in the AS specification at all — 8PH0 content runs to Topic 5, Waves and Particle Nature of Light, while the A-level runs to Topic 13, Oscillations. So the single practical that carries the single outstanding technique is, by construction, a second-year practical.

Pearson lists Nuclear Radiation among the topics examined on Paper 2: Advanced Physics II, paper code 9PH0/02, which in the FINAL Summer 2027 examination timetable falls on Thursday 27 May 2027 in the afternoon. A Year 13 meets Topic 11 twice, then: as written content on a dated paper, and as the only route to a technique the Endorsement will not sign off without.

How we read the mapping, and why we are stating it

Appendix 5d is a tick grid in a PDF, not a list, so a careless reading of it would be worth nothing. We extracted it twice by different methods: once from the flat text, counting tick glyphs per row, and once from the glyph coordinates, assigning every tick to a column by its position against the headings. Both returned 66 ticks and the same count in every column — 13 for technique 1, 12 for technique 2, 1 for technique 12 — and both put that tick on the Core Practical 15 row. We publish the column result and the per-practical counts, not the full 192-cell grid. The specification is published in full on Pearson’s qualification page, and Appendix 5d begins on page 83.

What the Other Seven Second-Year Practicals Add to the Technique Ledger

Core Practical 15 is one of eight practicals that appear only in the A-level specification. The other seven are worth knowing individually, because the minimum is a count and the techniques are a checklist. The last column is how many Appendix 5c techniques each is ticked for.

The spread in that last column is the practical point. Core Practical 12, calibrating a thermistor in a potential divider circuit, is ticked for six techniques. Core Practical 14, the pressure and volume of a gas at fixed temperature, is ticked for one. Against the Endorsement those two are worth very different amounts.

Now the arithmetic a Year 13 family can do for themselves. A student who has completed core practicals 1 to 8 has done 8 activities against a minimum of 12, so at least four more are needed. Four is a small number against eight candidates, and choosing them by convenience rather than by coverage is how a technique goes unevidenced. Choosing core practicals 12, 13, 14 and 16, for instance, satisfies the count of 12 exactly and still leaves technique 12 with nothing behind it, because none of those four involves ionising radiation.

This is not a claim that schools routinely get it wrong. It is a statement about where the slack sits. The Endorsement is the one part of an A-level physics course decided inside the school rather than by a marked script, so the difference between a comfortable pass and a gap is a scheduling decision taken in Year 13.

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Pearson Counts Practical Activities, Not Core Practicals — and What That Does and Does Not Let a School Substitute

The minimum is phrased as 12 practical activities, and that wording is deliberate. Pearson writes that the core practicals “provide opportunities for demonstrating competence in all the skills identified”, then adds that students “can also demonstrate these competencies in any additional practical activity undertaken throughout the course of study which covers the requirements of Appendix 5c”. A school is not locked into Pearson’s sixteen.

That latitude is real and it is bounded by the same list. Appendix 5c is the specification of what a substitute must do. A replacement for a circuits practical has to put a student in front of a circuit; a replacement for the diffraction-grating practical has to involve a laser or another light source. And a replacement for Core Practical 15 has to involve ionising radiation and a detector, because the technique reads “Use ionising radiation, including detectors.” A worksheet on half-life, a simulation of gamma attenuation, or a set of past-paper questions on count rates will not do it, however good they are as teaching. The technique names apparatus, and only apparatus satisfies it.

The judgement is the teacher’s. Practical work is assessed against the Common Practical Assessment Criteria, which Pearson describes as “consistent across exam boards”: “Students who demonstrate the required standard across all the requirements of the CPAC will receive a ‘pass’ grade.” Pearson adds a caution that matters here — students “may work in groups but teachers who award a pass to their students need to be confident of individual students’ competence”. A radioactive-source practical is one where a large class can easily become a few students handling the apparatus and the rest watching.

External checking is lighter than the word “monitored” suggests. Pearson states that “the correct application of CPAC to students’ work will be monitored through a system of visits to centres”, coordinated “across the exam boards by JCQ, to ensure that all centres are visited regularly, although not necessarily in each science subject”. A visit to a school is not necessarily a visit to its physics department, so whether Core Practical 15 or an equivalent actually happened is a question to ask the school. The useful version is specific: which of core practicals 9 to 16 are scheduled before the Summer 2027 papers, when, and is there a gamma-absorption activity among them?

Why the Outstanding Practical Also Costs Marks: What Paper 3 Draws From the Core Practicals

Because the Endorsement sits outside the grade, it is easy to read the practicals as an administrative hurdle. Pearson says otherwise, twice. Of the core practicals: “The 16 core practicals will provide the basis from which some of the Paper 3 examination questions will be drawn.” Of Paper 3: it “will include questions that assess conceptual and theoretical understanding of experimental methods (indirect practical skills) that will draw on students’ experiences of the core practicals”. A practical never run is lost twice.

Paper 3, General and Practical Principles in Physics (9PH0/03), is the largest of the three: 2 hours 30 minutes, 120 marks, and 40% of the qualification, against 1 hour 45 minutes and 90 marks for each of Papers 1 and 2. Pearson says its questions “may draw on any of the topics in this specification” and that it “will include synoptic questions”. In Summer 2027 it falls on Tuesday 8 June, in the morning. Less often published is how the assessment objectives are distributed across the three papers, which the specification sets out on page 55.

Read down the AO3 column. Paper 3 is banded at 13–15% of the qualification, each of Papers 1 and 2 at 5–7%. The bands do not overlap, so Paper 3 carries the highest AO3 weighting of the three wherever in its range a series lands. The AO1 column reverses it: 8–10% for Paper 3 against 11–13% for each of the others, the lowest of the three. Pearson's AO3 is “Analyse, interpret and evaluate scientific information, ideas and evidence, including in relation to issues”.

Put the two together and the shape of the paper is clear: Paper 3 has the lowest AO1 band and the highest AO3 band of the three, and it is the paper Pearson says draws its practical questions from the sixteen core practicals. A student who watched a practical rather than ran it can usually still recall what it showed; what they cannot easily produce under time is a judgement about why a reading was unreliable or how a procedure should be refined. That is the AO3 band, at its widest on the paper worth 40%.

This is about where revision effort goes, not about difficulty, and we do not rank the papers against one another. The Edexcel A-level Physics page sets out what each paper covers, and the A-level Physics overview covers the subject across boards. What the AO grid adds for a Year 13 is a reason to spend second-year practical time on the analysis rather than the procedure.

How Leading Tuition Works With a Year 13 Edexcel Physics Student

Our expert A-level physics tutors help Year 13 students taking Edexcel 9PH0 with the second-year content and the practical work behind it. A first session establishes two things: which of core practicals 9 to 16 the school has actually run, and how confident the student is with the data handling that Paper 3 builds on them. Those are different questions, and a student can be fine on one and exposed on the other.

Programmes are then built around the specification rather than a generic physics scheme: Topics 6 to 13 in the order the school is teaching them, the synoptic questions Pearson says Paper 3 will carry, and, for the practicals, the part a tutor can genuinely help with — the uncertainty analysis, the graph work, the questions in the AO3 band that ask how a procedure should be refined. Running the apparatus is the school’s job; understanding what a set of readings is worth is ours. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades.

Where a student is taking more than one science, the same second-year structure applies with different content, and we cover those separately — see Year 13 Edexcel A-level Chemistry and Year 13 Edexcel A-level Biology. Tutoring is one-to-one and online or in person, and the first consultation is free.

Frequently Asked Questions About Year 13 Edexcel A-Level Physics (9PH0)