A-Level Maths in Year 12: the September dip, and what to do about it

It is one of the most predictable moments in a school year. A pupil who sailed through GCSE Maths with an 8 or a 9 starts A-Level in September, and by the third week is quietly telling a parent they might have made a mistake. They have not. What they are meeting is the step up, and it catches good mathematicians precisely because they are good.

Why the step up bites

GCSE rewarded fluency; A-Level assumes it. At GCSE, being quick and accurate with algebra was most of the game. At A-Level it is the entry ticket. Surds, indices, quadratics, simultaneous equations, algebraic fractions — the course does not reteach them, it uses them, at speed, inside harder problems. A pupil whose algebra was good-enough-for-a-9 discovers that it is not good enough to be invisible, and everything slows down.

The pace is different. A-Level Maths covers a great deal of content, and the first term moves quickly through the pure mathematics that everything else depends on. Miss a week and you are not one topic behind; you are behind on the thing the next topic assumes.

The questions ask for more. Proof appears early. Multi-step problems with no signposting become normal. Marks go for the method and the reasoning, written out, not for the right number at the end. Pupils used to holding a solution in their head find they must learn to write mathematics, which is a skill in itself.

None of this depends on which exam board the school uses. Since 2017 the content of A-Level Maths has been the same across Edexcel, AQA and OCR; the boards differ in how they ask, not what they ask.

The six-week fix

The dip is normal. The slide — where a wobble in September becomes a lost year — is avoidable, and the window for avoiding it is roughly the first half-term. Three things work:

1. Repair the algebra now, deliberately. Fifteen minutes a day of the GCSE-level manipulation that A-Level assumes — not the new content, the old content until it is automatic. This is unglamorous and it is the highest-return work available in September.
2. Never let a topic pass unresolved. In this course, a gap compounds. Anything not understood by Friday should be understood by Monday, whether that takes a teacher, a classmate or a tutor.
3. Learn to write it down. Full method, every line, from the first week. Marks at A-Level are for the reasoning on the page.

When a tutor is worth it

If the first assessment comes back below what the pupil expected, that is the moment — not Christmas, and certainly not Easter. A qualified maths teacher can diagnose in one lesson whether the problem is algebraic fluency, pace, or mathematical writing, and each has a different fix. Six weeks of targeted work in the autumn typically does more than six months of anxiety later on.

Our A-Level Maths tutors are qualified teachers who teach the course in the classroom, which matters here more than at most levels: they know exactly where Year 12 goes wrong because they watch it happen every September. Lessons are an hour, online or face-to-face, and a single session is enough to get a proper diagnosis.

If your child is asking whether they should drop Maths: almost certainly not, and almost certainly not yet. Ask instead what, specifically, is hard. The answer is usually narrower than it feels, and narrower problems are the fixable kind.