Course Description

Pure and applied mathematics that will develop your skills in calculus, geometry, mechanics, statistics, making financial decisions and many more areas – as well as the application of these skills in the wider environment.

Course Content

This qualification is equally split between coursework and examination units with one exam (25%) being taken at the end of Year 12 and the remaining exam (25%) at the end of Year 13. The three coursework units will be moderated at various times throughout the two years with the weighting equally split between them, accounting for the remaining 50%.

The first year of the course develops skills learned in GCSE and introduces several new areas such as circle geometry, further equations and surds. New ways of calculating y=mx+c will be explored, alongside equations of circles and their tangents. Differentiation and integration studies commence too.

Students will then progress onto radian measure and exponential growth and decay. Revision of transformation of graphs from GCSE will be looked into alongside binomial expansions, trigonometric identities and areas under graphs.

The statistics element explores the application of statistical procedures to solving everyday problems. Students will engage with topics such as correlation and regression, normal and binomial distributions, confidence interval, variance and standard deviation. The new A Level has a stronger emphasis on using a large data set to help demonstrate the statistical concepts covered in the specification.

During the mechanics element, students will explore the application of many different mathematical models to help them solve problems from within the mechanical world, linking in very well with some physics topics. The unit covers topics such as Newton’s laws of motion, kinematics and projectiles.

Students will develop the skills that they have learned in the first year, furthering their understanding of topics such as trigonometry, logarithms and function transformations.

The second year of the A Level also introduces new concepts such as vector geometry and proof, alongside further exploration of rationalising expressions, parametric equations and trigonometric identities.

What could I do next?

Mathematics is one of the most widely accepted and respected subject choices by universities and is likely to enhance your application as it is among the most frequently asked for subjects when applying to universities. Even if you go on to study a degree that doesn’t require A-level Mathematics at university, then having it on your CV can be a great advantage for your future career. Employers favour Mathematics qualifications as it demonstrates that you can think logically and problem solve. In addition it shows that you have got a grasp for numbers which may well make you stand out from the crowd when applying for jobs in industry, management, business or teaching.