The Option Block Experiment

There are lots of good reasons to offer additional maths qualifications to Key Stage 4 students on top of their standard Maths GCSE. As far as I know, maths is the only subject that has add-ons available. There's no Further English, Further Physics, Further History... our subject is an anomaly. There are many students who adore maths, and often the same students are incredibly good at maths, and they just can't get enough of it. 

At Key Stage 4 we are lucky enough to have a number of qualifications we can offer students who want to do extra maths: Edexcel has Level 2 Extended Maths Certificate, OCR has Additional Mathematics and AQA has Certificate in Further Maths. In my opinion, these qualifications offer the following:

• Enjoyment and Enrichment – if a student enjoys maths, they get the opportunity to do more of it! These courses feature interesting topics that go beyond GCSE, such as calculus, matrices and trigonometric identities. Keen mathematicians love this!
• Preparation for A level – although it’s not essential to take these qualifications in order to succeed in A Level Maths and A Level Further Maths, they do give a significant advantage.
• GCSE Grade Boost – studying these courses strengthens algebra, geometry and number skills, and develops reasoning and problem solving, helping students to secure a Grade 9 in their Maths GCSE.

When my school was brand new, we decided in advance that once we had our first Year 11 cohort we would offer them AQA's lovely Level 2 Certificate in Further Maths. So when the time came I invited 32 students to join the course (I selected students who were on track for Grade 9s in Maths GCSE - they all eagerly accepted). I ran it after school every Wednesday. I did this for two successive cohorts. It was a great success, in terms of both outcomes and student feedback, but we decided to change our delivery model for the following reasons:

• Delivering these lessons was a significant extra workload for me - I had to plan the lessons, deliver the lessons, mark mock exams, and do a lot of past paper printing. I already had a full teaching load so I struggled to keep on top of all this extra work.
• I'm all about teaching in depth. Teaching in a rush makes me really unhappy. I’d never enter students for an exam if I'd not taught them all the content, and although I had just about enough time to cover the L2 FM curriculum in my after-school lessons, it was all quicker than I would have liked. For example, I taught the whole of binomial expansion in just one lesson. And the same goes for all the functions content - domain, range, piecewise functions etc - although I did get through it in one lesson, it didn't feel like particularly good teaching. 
• I didn't like it that the class felt like an exclusive club. I only had space for 32 students and it was me who chose them. Some students were disappointed not to be given the opportunity to join the course, and this may have damaged their confidence. My school is totally non-selective and we are delighted that over 50% of our students get Grade 7+ in their Maths GCSE. Given that L2 FM is advertised as being suitable for students on Grades 7 - 9, in theory I had one hundred students who were suitable for the course, but I only allowed 32 of them to enter. So there would have been students who love maths who felt excluded. I wanted to change that. 

The obvious solution to the above problems is to move L2 Further Maths into the school day, giving it more time and proper staffing. We decided to put it in an option block i.e. students can choose it as a GCSE option, as an alternative to choosing say GCSE art or drama or PE. At my school students get four options which they choose in Year 9 and start in Year 10 - we encourage one language and one humanity, leaving them two options where they can choose whatever they enjoy - and for many students, that’s extra maths.

But there are two problems with this idea:

• L2 Further Maths doesn’t count towards Progress 8
• As much as I love teaching in depth, three lessons a week for two years is way too much time to deliver this course!

So we decided to try something: we bundled GCSE Statistics and L2 Further Maths together and offered it as a single option. We decided to teach the Stats in Y10 and Further Maths in Year 11 (with both qualifications sat at the end of Year 11, and stats retrieval every lesson throughout Year 11). 

We decided that we’d only allow students on track for a 7+ in GCSE maths to join this option course, making it our only selective GCSE option. This was necessary because:

• L2 Further Maths has challenging content, and AQA say the course is suitable for students working at Grades 7 - 9 in maths
• Studying two courses in two years means the pace is fairly fast
• An extra qualification to revise for at the end of Year 11 creates significant additional workload - high performing students are best placed to cope with this demand.

On our first time offering this option course we had 31 students sign up. We have just had the results through for this first cohort. 

Numbers have grown quickly. For September 2025 we have 63 out of 200 students joining the course - making it the fifth most popular option subject at my school after history, geography, Spanish and business. We’re really pleased it’s so popular - it's fantastic that around a third of our students enjoy maths so much that they want three extra maths lessons a week on top of the five lessons they’re already doing. This is pleasing, but also a bit of a gamble - I’ve doubled the number of students taking Further Maths at my school, and I’m no longer taking all the best mathematicians in the year, so can I make sure they all get a good outcome? This year’s results bode well. Outcomes for both Further Maths and GCSE Statistics were excellent, with the majority of our students getting Grades 8 and 9s. We had six students who achieved the 'triple nine' (a Grade 9 in maths, stats and FM). 

Things to Consider

If you're thinking about introducing a similar set up, here are a few things to consider:

• Difficulty level: At the request of their parents, we made exceptions to our entry requirements and allowed three students onto our option course who were working at a Grade 5/6 in maths. They were absolutely fine with GCSE Statistics in Year 10 but massively struggled with Further Maths in Year 11 (getting a U in their FM mock while the rest of the class were on 7+). We decided to withdraw two of these students from L2 FM and just entered them into GCSE Statistics, but this was tricky logistically as we needed to find somewhere for them to study independently during FM lessons. Seeing the difficulty they had with L2 FM will make us more cautious about who does the course going forward. AQA's L2 Certificate in Further Maths is specifically aimed at students who are working at Grades 7 - 9 in maths - it's not accessible to students without strong algebra skills.
• Curriculum design: I met a teacher from another school who offers the same option as us (a combination of GCSE Stats and L2 Further Maths) but delivers them concurrently rather than consecutively. So the two qualifications are combined - they switch between Stats topics and Further Maths topics throughout Year 10 and 11. Students are used to moving between statistics, geometry, number and algebra in normal maths lessons so this isn't a big deal for them. I like this idea - the problem with teaching consecutively like we do is that they could forget all their stats during Year 11. Another way to tackle this problem is to get them to take the external Statistics GCSE exams at the end of Year 10 when it's all fresh in their minds, then just leave them to focus on L2 FM in Year 11. We are considering this for future years!
• Resources: There are loads of resources for Level 2 Further Maths - AQA provide mock papers, worksheets and excellent topic tests, and websites like 1st Class Maths, Corbett Maths and Dr Austin have lots of L2 FM content. Plus a lot of A level content like old Solomon worksheets are also suitable. I have never struggled to find L2 FM resources. But there aren't as many resources for GCSE Statistics. Edexcel has some resources on the Emporium but they are mainly just collections of past exam questions. They don't have secure mocks (they have shadow papers but I'm not a fan of shadow papers). I was frustrated to have to use last year's exam papers for our GCSE Stats mock, because I know lots of students would have found those papers online and already completed them. AQA does have secure mock papers for GCSE Stats, and they have some new worksheets which will be available soon, but they don't have a published revision guide that students can buy, whereas Edexcel does. 
• Style: We originally decided to use Edexcel for GCSE Statistics but after marking the mock exams I decided we'd swap to AQA going forward. The content is the same but the exam style is quite different. In Edexcel papers they use many convoluted contexts and the questions are very wordy. For example in our mock there was a confusing question about Rugby Forwards and Rugby Backs and a question about "the effect of changing land usage on the amount of surface runoff water for areas of land around Brandywine Creek" that I had to read twice to get my head round. This style isn't right for our students, particularly those who are EAL.
• Grading: Edexcel GCSE Statistics has surprisingly low grade boundaries. In 2025, students only needed 76% in Higher GCSE Stats to get a Grade 9. And 50% for a Grade 7. And ridiculously, only 15% for a Grade 4. So students can demonstrate very little understanding and still pass. I don't like this at all! I wonder if the grade boundaries are affected by the fact that some schools enter students for GCSE Stats without any dedicated teaching of the subject - it's just hoped they can get a grade in it with their existing knowledge of probability and graphs - and this means scores are often quite low. 
• Impact on A Level: Offering L2 Further Maths is a strategy for ensuring good A level grades and recruiting students to A Level Further Maths. We are yet to see whether studying GCSE Statistics also has some impact on students' success in the applied content of A level. 

There are lots of alternative models for the delivery of these two qualifications. For example I know some schools deliver Certificate of Further Maths to their top set during their normal maths lessons, and some schools enter entire cohorts of students into GCSE Statistics (both Foundation and Higher). If you're considering different delivery models, you will always find someone on Bluesky or X who can share their experience with you. 

A lot of people have asked me about our option block experiment, and I promised I would blog about it - I just had to wait for our first set of results to check the experiment had actually been successful! It was, so we will continue offering this option to our students. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.