Set the target wherever you like: this is not a limit we impose, and plenty of students beat it. It is here because the honest answer surprises most families, and knowing it early is what makes a plan work.
This is what happens to students nationally, counted from the day they start the A level.
Chance of reaching a given A level Maths grade, by GCSE Maths grade
A*/ABCD, E or UDid not finish the course
GCSE grade 975%85%90% get there
GCSE grade 833%56%75% get there
GCSE grade 79%22%44% get there
GCSE grade 63%8%21% get there
What this chart cannot tell you
It covers every student in the country, and the great majority of them study A level Maths with no individual support at all. It is a picture of the national average, not a forecast for any one student.
A GCSE grade sets the starting point, not the destination. What moves a student up a chart like this is finding the gaps early, learning how to revise properly, and building real exam technique. Those are the three things we work on.
Where these come from. Grade outcomes are Edexcel entry data for 31,107 students, GCSE Maths 2017 to A level Maths 2019, published via the Maths Emporium. Combining grades 8 and 9 gives 88.8% reaching at least a C, within a percentage point of the 89% found independently by Cambridge University Press & Assessment for a later cohort. Those figures count only students who sat the exam, so we have scaled them by how many finish the course, which runs from about 92% for the strongest starters down to about 74% for the weakest (FFT Education Datalab, 2026). That last step is our own estimate, so treat the exact numbers as a guide rather than a measurement. The shape of the picture is not in doubt.
A gap between where a student is now and where they want to be is the most common reason families come to us. It is very fixable when it is caught early.