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 better, so the bar keeps rising.
For Further Maths that explanation is closer to true than it is for GCSE or A-Level maths, and it is still not the reason the boundary moved. The exam board’s own figures separate the two, and the difference changes 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.
Why there is no single number out of 300
Start with the thing that makes Further Maths different to report on.
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. Everything below plots Core Pure 1 and 2, out of 150, which is the part every candidate sits.
Thirty three marks bought half a point
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. Those 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
The single year in the middle is the clearest of the lot. From June 2023 to June 2024 the Core Pure total for a grade A went up 27 marks, from 89 to 116, and the share getting an A or better went up four tenths of a point, from 57.2% to 57.6%.
If a rising bar meant a stronger year group, the bottom rail would have moved with the top one. It moved by the width of a rounding error.
The one place the usual explanation has a point
This is where Further Maths parts company with the other two subjects, and it is worth being straight about it.
Look further back than 2023. In June 2019, the first full sitting of this specification, 52.7% got an A or better. Since 2023 that figure has sat between 57.2% and 57.7%. So five points more of this cohort now reach an A than did seven years ago, and that is a real change, not a rounding error.
Two things are going on, and neither is the boundary.
The entry has grown. 8,920 students sat 9FM0 in 2019 against 14,294 this summer, up 60%. A subject that grows usually dilutes its results; this one has not, which says something about who is choosing it.
And 2019 was the first cohort through a brand new specification, taught by teachers who had never taught it before. Cohorts tend to do better on a qualification the longer it has existed, because the teaching catches up with it.
What did not happen is the thing people assume. The share did not climb year after year alongside the boundary. It stepped up once, somewhere between 2019 and 2023, and has been flat since while the boundary moved 33 marks.
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.
What the boundary is actually for
Grade boundaries are not set when the paper is written. They are set after almost every script in the country has been marked.
Ofqual’s own guidance says it plainly:
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 the whole mechanism. The boundary is how the exam board keeps a grade A in 2026 worth the same as a grade A in 2023, whatever this year’s papers turned out to be like.
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, where the share barely moves at all.
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
Boundaries go up when the papers are easier and down when they are harder. They move so that the grade does not.
Further Maths adds one honest caveat. More of this cohort reach an A than did in 2019, and that looks like a genuine shift in who takes the subject and how well it is taught. But it is a single step that happened before 2023, not a year on year climb, and it is not what the boundary is telling you.
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 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.