Year 13 OCR A-Level Chemistry (H432) in 2027

Year 13 OCR A-level chemistry is the second year of one of two separate Ofqual qualifications: Chemistry A (H432) or Chemistry B, Salters (H433). Both are worth 270 marks across three papers, sat on 28 May, 10 June and 17 June 2027. Only H433 carries a pre-release Advance Notice article, published on 13 March 2027 and worth 20 to 25 marks.

The 13 March 2027 Advance Notice: 20 to 25 marks a Salters candidate is allowed to see first

If your child sits OCR Chemistry B, Salters, their second paper is not entirely unseen. H433/02, Scientific literacy in chemistry, is a 100-mark paper, and OCR's specification (Version 4.1) states that it “includes a pre-release Advance Notice article (see Section 5) worth 20 to 25 marks”. Those marks are not a bonus section bolted on to the end. They are questions built on a scientific article that OCR hands out months in advance.

The publication date is fixed to the day, not the year. The specification says the Advance Notice “will be available for download via the OCR website on 13 March each year”, a practice running since 13 March 2017 for the first A level assessment in June 2017. OCR's key dates file for 2026/27 confirms 13 March 2027 for the June 2027 series. H433/02 itself is sat on Thursday 10 June 2027. That is a window of 89 days.

What a student may do with the article in those 89 days is unusually open, and OCR spells it out in the candidate instructions printed in the specification. They may seek advice from their teacher about its content. They may discuss it with others in their class. They may investigate the topic themselves using any resources available to them. Nothing about the article is confidential and nothing about preparing for it is off-limits.

Two constraints matter. The first is that the article cannot be carried into the exam: “The Advance Notice material must not be taken into the examination. The examination paper H433/02 will contain a fresh copy of the article, as an insert.” Annotations, highlighting and margin notes all stay at home, though the text itself is in front of the candidate on the day. The second is timing. OCR warns candidates directly that they will not have time to read the article for the first time in the examination and still finish the paper.

OCR's guidance to centres is that the material should reach candidates “at least four weeks before the examination date”, which for 2027 means by 13 May at the latest. A school that hands it out on publication day gives its students the full 89 days; a school that waits until the minimum gives them 28. Both are within OCR's rules, so it is worth asking which your child's department does.

The scale is easy to underrate. Set against the 270 marks that make up the whole A level, 20 to 25 marks is between 7.4% and 9.3% of the qualification, decided on material the candidate has been holding since March.

Chemistry A candidates get no pre-release material, and OCR's own key dates file is where that is provable

The natural next question is whether Chemistry A has something equivalent. It does not, and the honest way to establish that is to search the document that would have to mention it. OCR publishes a single spreadsheet of key dates covering every one of its qualifications for 2026/27. Searching all 421 rows of its Key dates 2026-27 sheet for “advance notice” returns exactly one row, checked on 26 September 2026.

That row is dated 13 March 2027 and reads: “Advance Notice materials for A Level Biology B (Advancing Biology) (H422/02), Chemistry B (Salters) (H433/02) and Physics B (Advancing Physics) (H557/02) published on Cambridge OCR website”. Three papers, all of them the B-route sciences. H432 is not among them, and no second Advance Notice row exists anywhere in the file.

So the two OCR chemistry routes differ in what a candidate is permitted to see before the exam, not only in what they are taught. A Chemistry A student prepares for three papers that are wholly unseen. A Salters student prepares for two unseen papers and one that is roughly a fifth to a quarter pre-released by mark.

This changes how the spring term is best used rather than how hard the qualification is. On H432 every mark available in May and June rewards recall, application and exam technique across the whole specification, and there is no external event in the calendar between the February entry deadline and study leave. On H433 there is: 13 March 2027 is a date a revision plan can be built around, and the fortnight after it is the cheapest time in the year to bank 20 to 25 marks. For the breakdown of what each route teaches, our OCR A-level chemistry page sets out the modules and storylines side by side.

Where the 270 marks sit, and why the two routes load them differently

Both OCR chemistry A levels are marked out of 270 and both carry a total qualification time of 360 hours, but they do not distribute the marks the same way. Chemistry A spreads them almost evenly across its first two papers; Salters front-loads its first paper and keeps its third short. The table below is drawn from the two specifications and from OCR's final June 2027 timetable.

All six papers are morning sessions. Marks and weightings from OCR specifications H432 Version 3.1 and H433 Version 4.1; dates from OCR's final June 2027 AS and A Level timetable, read on 26 September 2026.

Two practical consequences follow. On Salters, 41% of the qualification is decided in the first sitting on 28 May 2027, so a weak morning there is harder to recover from than the equivalent morning on Chemistry A, where the first paper carries 37%. And the third papers are different in kind rather than in name: H432/03 is Unified chemistry, drawing on all six teaching modules, while H433/03 is Practical skills in chemistry. Both run to 1h 30m, and both are the lightest paper on their route.

The multiple-choice sections differ too. On Chemistry A, papers 01 and 02 each open with a 15-mark multiple-choice Section A followed by an 85-mark Section B. On Salters, H433/01 opens with 30 marks of multiple choice against an 80-mark Section B, so twice as much of that paper turns on single-answer questions.

The Practical Endorsement closes on 15 May 2027, thirteen days before the first written paper

The part of the qualification most families assume runs to the end of the course finishes first. OCR's key dates file gives 15 May 2027, a Saturday, as the “A Level Sciences and GCSE English Language Spoken language practical endorsement grade submission deadline” for the June 2027 series. The first written chemistry paper is on 28 May 2027. By the time a Year 13 student sits down to their first exam, their practical result has been with OCR for 13 days and nothing they write in May or June can change it.

The endorsement requires a minimum of 12 assessed practical activities, teacher assessed against the Common Practical Assessment Criteria. The specification is deliberately flexible about when they happen: “The practical activities can be completed at any point during the two year A level course at the discretion of the centre.” That flexibility is exactly why the submission date matters. There is no OCR rule reserving particular activities for Year 13, so what remains outstanding in the spring term is a question for the school, not something a specification can answer.

It is also why a missed practical is a different kind of problem from a missed lesson. A student who is off school for a fortnight in April can revise the theory they missed; an assessed activity they did not perform has to be rescheduled and signed off before 15 May 2027, and study leave is not available for it.

The result is reported on its own terms. OCR states that results for the A Level Sciences Practical Endorsements “will be shown independently of the qualification grade on the certificate”. Candidates who reach the minimum standard are awarded a Pass; those who do not are recorded as Not Classified, and that is printed on the certificate too. It does not move the A level grade in either direction, which is worth saying plainly because the two results arrive together and are easily confused.

Monitoring is organised across boards rather than by OCR alone. The specification explains that the awarding organisations use centre entries for A level biology, chemistry and physics from the previous summer to jointly plan monitoring visits for the current two-year cycle, with most centres monitored for a different science than last cycle and large centres monitored in all three each cycle.

What the entry code letter commits a Year 13 candidate to, and the dates it has to be decided by

A Year 13 student is not simply entered for “H432”. OCR requires every A level chemistry candidate to be entered under one of two entry options, and the letter on the end is the decision. On Chemistry A the options are H432A and H432C; Salters mirrors them exactly as H433A and H433C.

Both options carry the same three written components. They differ in the fourth. H432A includes component 04, Practical Endorsement in chemistry, as non-exam assessment with visiting monitoring, which is the normal route for a student completing the endorsement with their current school. H432C instead carries component 80, Practical Endorsement in chemistry – Carried Forward, which is used when the candidate already holds an endorsement result. A candidate retaking the A level must retake every examined component, but the endorsement result may be carried forward for the lifetime of the specification rather than repeated.

The entry is made by the centre, and the window closed before the spring term. These are the dates OCR publishes for the June 2027 series.

From OCR's key dates file for all qualifications 2026/27, read on 26 September 2026. Fees apply at the two late stages; OCR publishes the amounts separately and they are not reproduced here.

Two of these are worth flagging to a family rather than leaving with the exams officer. Access arrangements close on 21 March 2027, which is later than most schools' internal cut-off, so a diagnosis or assessment that lands in the spring term is not automatically too late. And 21 April 2027 is the last date an entry can be withdrawn with a refund, which is the practical deadline for a decision about dropping the subject rather than the exam dates themselves.

What the AS Salters withdrawal actually changes for a student already in Year 13

OCR is withdrawing one of its four chemistry qualifications, and a Year 13 family reading about it is entitled to know whether it touches them. For a student sitting a full A level in June 2027, it does not.

The check is straightforward. OCR's withdrawal notice lists every qualification being retired. Extracting every specification code named on it returns 16: H004, H005, H006, H009, H010, H014, H022, H033, H043, H044, H059, H070, H074, H081, H105 and H143, checked on 26 September 2026. Of the four OCR chemistry codes, exactly one appears — H033, the AS Level in Chemistry B (Salters). H432, H433 and H032 return no match at all.

OCR's final June 2027 timetable says the same thing independently. Across its 268 rows, the “final assessment opportunity” marker is attached to H033/01 and H033/02 and to neither of the full A levels. No such flag appears against H432/01, H432/02, H432/03, H433/01, H433/02 or H433/03.

The timetable also settles the sequencing. The last AS Salters papers are sat on 11 May and 18 May 2027, both morning papers of 1h 30m, which is before the A level chemistry papers begin on 28 May 2027. A Year 13 student's own exams start after the qualification being withdrawn has already had its final sitting. The withdrawal itself — why OCR is doing it and what the AS course covers in its last year — is set out on our Year 12 OCR A-level chemistry page, which is written for the cohort it actually affects.

How Leading Tuition works with Year 13 OCR chemistry students

Our expert A-level chemistry tutors help Year 13 students across the UK on both OCR routes, and the first thing a programme establishes is which one a student is on, because H432 and H433 share almost no paper structure. For a Salters student that means treating 13 March 2027 as a fixed point in the plan and working the Advance Notice article properly in the weeks after it lands, rather than meeting it for the first time in a mock. For a Chemistry A student it means building toward three unseen papers, with the 100-mark first sitting on 28 May 2027 carrying the same weight as the second.

Tutoring runs one to one and is built around what a student's own school has already covered, their mock papers and the modules their centre has left until the spring. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. We are rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 59 reviews, read on 3 October 2026. If your child takes another science alongside chemistry, or sits a different board, our A-level chemistry hub and our Year 13 AQA A-level chemistry page cover the neighbouring routes, and the full range is on our A-level tutoring page.

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