Hey you … yep I’m still here writing up what we can garner from examiners reports and this time you’ll find some of the key points from AQA’s GCSE Higher Paper 1.
Overall, there was a big sense that the paper was incredibly stable … the mean score was within one mark of last year, which means the difficulty level and the cohort standard were spot on compared to Summer 2025.
So … here’s my breakdown of the good, the bad, and the downright frustrating arithmetic slips we need to tackle in the classroom.
The Good News!
You know that thing people say … “I’ve got good news and bad news” … I always say start with some good news … what kind of lunatic starts with the bad news??
Anyway, students smashed it on several higher-tier staples:
- Algebra Essentials: Solving quadratics by factorising, completing the square, and multiplying three linear expressions went down really well.
- Indices & Sequences: Fractional indices and Fibonacci-type sequences were absolute strengths.
- Estimation & Basic Ratio: Estimation by approximation and ratio problems involving the difference between two parts were answered brilliantly.
Where Students Struggled
Of course, there are always those topics that cause a bit of a headache and there were a few topics highlighted where marks slipped away:
- Set Notation: The complement notation really threw students off (the same is seen on Pearson’s papers when this is assessed) … Many students gave values instead of probabilities … RTFQ!!.
- Congruence Proofs: It was noted that students are writing essays describing the shapes instead of using structured mathematical arguments (like SSS, SAS) and proper three-letter angle notation.
- Rearranging Formulae: When a square root and a reciprocal are involved, things go wrong …. fast. Students forgot to use brackets when squaring or left out parts of the expression.
- Coordinate Geometry: Finding the area of a triangle on a coordinate grid proved highly challenging, with less than a quarter of the marks awarded.
Some other things worth noting …
Worth giving these a special mention, because some are relatively easy things to try to address in the classroom :
- Times tables: It breaks your heart to read it, but some students correctly identified the maths required and then worked out that 36/4 = 8 … work on times tables is still needed.
- Converting fractions to decimals: Where there was a conversion of something similar (but not quite as I don’t want to publish anything about specific “locked” questions) to 1/500 students seemed to want to use the digit ‘5’ instead of ‘2’ .. which is tough to take on Higher tier.
- Surds: Students were making up their own laws …trying to cancel integers with surds for example thinking that the (square root of 12)/16) becomes (square root of 3)/4 which is obviously not the case.
There’s always plenty to take away from reading this sh!t but I’ve done it for you.
Be back soon
Mel x
Happy weekending … whatever you’re up to … I’m off out to my “shed” to my “happy place” to go and get dirty (not what you think!) … off to make some more of these for a commission I’ve accepted.
