Why Are Further Maths Grade Boundaries Going Up?
Edexcel A-Level Further Maths 9FM0. The Core Pure boundary for a grade A rose 33 marks between 2023 and this summer, and the share of students getting an A barely moved.
Further Maths students get the sharpest version of this every August. In June 2023 a grade A needed 89 marks out of 150 across the two Core Pure papers. This summer it needed 122. That is 22% of those two papers, added to the bar in three years.
The usual explanation is that students keep getting cleverer, so the bar keeps rising. That is not what moved it. There are two bigger reasons, and they change how you should revise.
Everything below is Edexcel A-Level Further Maths, specification 9FM0. The AS is a separate qualification and is not in these figures. Marks are for Core Pure 1 and 2, out of 150, the two papers every candidate sits.
The paper changed, not the students
Every June is a new set of papers, and no two sets are equally hard. When the papers are kinder, everyone scores more marks, so the mark you need for a grade has to rise. Otherwise far more students would get the grade than it is meant for.
In June 2023, 9,592 students sat 9FM0 and 57.2% of them got a grade A or better. Core Pure for a grade A came to 89.
In June 2026, 14,294 sat it and 57.7% got a grade A or better. Core Pure for a grade A came to 122.
Thirty three more marks. Half a percentage point more students. The 2026 shares are Pearson’s provisional figures, which it revises later. The boundaries are final.
Pearson Edexcel A-Level Further Maths 9FM0
Marks needed for a grade A across Core Pure 1 and 2, out of 150
89 to 122 marks across the 6 series
Share who got a grade A or better
52.7% to 66.2% across the same 6 series
If the rising boundary were the year group getting stronger, the bottom rail would move with the top one. It moved by the width of a rounding error.
A single year shows it even more clearly. From 2023 to 2024 a grade A cost 27 more marks, rising from 89 to 116. The share getting an A or better went up four tenths of a point, from 57.2% to 57.6%. The 2024 papers were simply easier.
Ofqual puts it in one line:
If an exam is easier than in previous years, the grade boundaries for that paper will be higher. If it is harder, the grade boundaries will be lower.
That is how a grade A in 2026 is kept worth the same as a grade A in 2023, whatever this year’s papers turned out to be like. A higher boundary tells you about the papers. It does not tell you that you have to beat last year’s students.
We have written separately about what boundary movement means for your revision target, and about the same question for A-Level maths and GCSE maths.
Students got better at the exam, not at maths
This A-Level was first sat in June 2019. Teachers were teaching it for the first time, and there were no past A-Level papers to practise on.
Results dipped that summer. In 2018, on the old course, 57.8% of Further Maths students across every exam board got an A or better. In 2019, the first summer of the new one, 53.5% did. At Pearson it was 52.7%.
Then they climbed back. By 2023, the next normal summer, 57.2% of Pearson’s candidates got an A or better, roughly where results had been on the old course. It has stayed within half a point of that ever since.
This is the pattern Ofqual calls the sawtooth effect. Results dip when a new exam arrives, then climb back as teachers learn how questions tend to be worded, where the method marks sit, and how an examiner wants working set out.
That is real progress, but it is progress at the exam. Knowing how to write an answer an examiner will credit is worth learning. It is just not the same thing as understanding more maths.
And it has run its course. The recovery was over by 2023. The 33 marks the boundary has climbed since then are the first reason, not this one.
The years to ignore
The table below has two lines that look spectacular and mean nothing about standards.
2020 and 2021 show 71.8% and 76.2% getting an A or better. They are also the two years with no summer exams. Grades came from teachers, and the autumn sittings that replaced the exams were tiny: 225 students in October 2020 and 83 in November 2021, against 14,294 this summer.
2022 is next at 66.2%, and its Core Pure boundary for a grade A was 101. That was Ofqual’s staging post on the way back to pre-pandemic grading, and by 2023 it was gone.
So the three biggest moves in the share of top grades came from how grades were awarded that year, not from the papers.
Why there is no single number out of 300
A-Level maths is three papers that everyone sits, so the three boundaries add up to one total out of 300. Further Maths is two compulsory Core Pure papers and then two papers you choose from eight options, and the options are not priced the same.
In June 2026 a grade A* on a paper 3 option ranged from 59 out of 75 on Decision 1 to 70 on Further Statistics 1. On a paper 4 option it ranged from 58 on Further Pure 2 to 67 on Decision 2.
Add the cheapest pair to the Core Pure total and an A* came to 253 out of 300. Add the dearest and the same A* came to 273. Twenty marks apart, decided by nothing except which options your school teaches.
So there is no honest single figure for the whole qualification. That is why the marks in this article are for Core Pure 1 and 2, out of 150, the part every candidate sits.
Every June series of this specification
| June | Grade A* | Grade A | Grade B | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marks | Got this | Marks | Got this | Marks | Got this | |
| 2019 | not published | 23.8% | 94 | 28.9% | 77 | 20.1% |
| 2020 | none | 40.7% | none | 31.1% | none | 16.3% |
| 2021 | none | 49.8% | none | 26.4% | none | 12.9% |
| 2022 | 121 | 38.9% | 101 | 27.3% | 81 | 16.2% |
| 2023 | 107 | 27.6% | 89 | 29.6% | 73 | 19.6% |
| 2024 | 130 | 28.2% | 116 | 29.4% | 99 | 20.9% |
| 2025 | 132 | 28.3% | 114 | 28.9% | 97 | 21.5% |
| 2026* | 136 | 27.8% | 122 | 29.9% | 104 | 23.1% |
A series with a cohort under a quarter of the largest here is greyed and left off the figure above, which names it: a few thousand candidates sitting a specification early is a fact about who sat it rather than about the standard. Each share is the students who got that grade itself, so the rows do not add up to the figure Pearson publishes, which counts everyone at that grade or above. An asterisk marks a year whose shares are Pearson's first published figures, which it revises later; the boundaries on that row are final. No summer exams were sat in 2020 or 2021, so there are no boundaries for those two years. The grades came from teacher assessment instead, which is why they are the two highest lines in the table. Boundaries are from Pearson's notional component documents and shares are from Pearson's grade statistics. Both are linked on the GCSE maths past papers page, series by series.
Read each pair of columns together. Across the six sittings that actually had exams, Core Pure for a grade A ranged over 33 marks and the share getting that grade itself ranged over 2.6 points, from 27.3% to 29.9%.
One row is worth a second look. June 2019 has a share for A* but no marks, because Pearson published grade statistics for that series without publishing a notional A* boundary for the components. We know 23.8% of that cohort got an A*, and no published figure says what it cost them.
What to do with this
Stop using last year’s boundary as this year’s target. It describes last year’s papers. Yours have not been written into a boundary yet.
Aim above the top of the recent range, not at the middle of it. Across the four sittings since grading returned to normal, Core Pure for a grade A has run from 89 to 122 out of 150, and this summer it was 122. Train for 122 and a hard paper cannot take the grade off you.
Treat your option papers as part of the target. The Core Pure boundary is the same for everyone. Your option boundaries are not, and in 2026 they varied by 11 marks on paper 3 alone. Look up the boundaries for the two options you are actually sitting, not an average.
Do not read a high boundary as bad news. A high boundary usually means an accessible paper, which is the paper you want. It also means marks are cheaper to lose, so the careless ones cost more.
Every series, paper by paper, with its boundaries and its outcomes printed beside them for both the A-Level and the AS, is on our Further Maths past papers page. To turn your own mock marks into a realistic grade range, use the grade predictor.
The short version
A higher boundary does not mean students got smarter. It happens for two bigger reasons.
The papers change every year. When they are easier, everyone scores more, so the boundary rises to keep the grade worth the same. From 2023 to 2024 a grade A cost 27 more Core Pure marks, and the share getting one rose by four tenths of a point.
Students learn the exam. Results dipped when this course was new in 2019, then climbed back as teachers and students learned what the examiners want. Ofqual calls it the sawtooth effect, and in Further Maths it was over by 2023.
Since 2023 the boundary has taken 33 more marks for half a point more students. So the number to beat is not last year’s boundary. It is the best mark you are capable of putting on the paper.
Figures in this article come from Pearson’s notional component grade boundaries and Pearson’s grade statistics for 9FM0, both published after each series. Marks are the total across Core Pure 1 and 2 unless a single option paper is named. The figures for every exam board in 2018 and 2019 are from the Joint Council for Qualifications, GCE A Level and GCE AS Level results, summer 2019. The quotation is from Ofqual and the Department for Education’s guidance, GCSE and A level grading: what you need to know, and the 2022 grading policy is set out in Ofqual’s approach to grading in summer 2022. The sawtooth effect is explained in GCSEs 2021: what is the sawtooth effect? and studied in An investigation into the Sawtooth Effect in secondary school assessments in England.