A-Level Maths Past Papers: Where to Find Them for Edexcel, AQA and OCR — and How to Use Them Properly

Always start with the exam board's own website. Third-party revision sites can be useful, but they sometimes mislabel papers, mix up specifications or host mark schemes without examiner reports. The board's version is free, current and complete.

Each board's A-level maths qualification has three papers of two hours each. What differs is how the applied content is split — and that matters when you choose papers to practise, because a student who struggles with mechanics needs the paper where mechanics lives.

Students are often frustrated to find that the most recent papers are missing. That is deliberate. Schools need unseen, realistic papers for mocks, and a paper that every student has already downloaded is useless for that purpose. So the boards hold back their latest series.

Pearson Edexcel states that its past papers are free to teachers and students, but only teachers can access papers sat within the past 12 months. AQA keeps recent papers in its secure area for schools: when I checked its public A-level maths resources in October 2026, the newest papers listed were from June 2023. OCR, now branded Cambridge OCR, keeps its full and secure assessment materials on its Teach Cambridge platform for schools.

The practical upshot is that your child will probably meet the most recent papers as school mocks — which is exactly where they are most valuable. If your child is not sitting mocks at school, it is worth asking their maths teacher whether a locked paper can be set under supervised conditions.

Fewer than you would think. The current A-level maths specifications were first taught in 2017 and first examined in summer 2018. There were then no summer exams in 2020 or 2021, when grades were decided by schools, although boards ran autumn series for students who wanted to sit the papers — which is why you will see papers labelled November 2020 or October 2020.

Add each board's sample assessment materials, published before the first exams, and a student realistically has fewer than ten full sets of real papers for their own board, some of which are locked. At three papers a set, that is a finite resource, and it needs planning.

The 2022 papers are worth a note. That year, students were given advance information about the main topics on each paper, as part of the recovery from the pandemic. The papers themselves were full-length and examined the normal specification, so they are still good practice; just remember the original students knew roughly what was coming.

Once your board's papers are used up, there are two good sources of extra practice. The first is other boards' papers. A-level maths content is set nationally by the Department for Education, so an Edexcel pure question is usually excellent practice for an AQA student, and vice versa. The differences are in structure, question style and the large data set used in statistics, so mark against that board's own mark scheme and skip questions that depend on its data set.

The second is legacy papers from the old modular specification — the C1 to C4 pure papers, plus mechanics and statistics units such as M1 and S1. There are a lot of them, and the pure questions in particular are still useful. But they were written for a different course: shorter papers, more predictable question styles, and content that does not exactly match the current specification.

My rule is that legacy papers are for topic practice, never for timed rehearsal. If a student wants to drill integration by parts, a pile of C4 questions is ideal. If they want to know whether they are ready for June, only a current-specification paper under exam conditions will tell them.

A past paper is a diagnostic test first and practice second. The value is not in the two hours spent sitting it but in the hour spent marking it and the week spent fixing what it revealed. Students who skip the marking are mostly practising their mistakes.

Here is the routine I teach. It works for every board, and parents can supervise all of it without knowing any maths.

Year 12 is for topic questions. As each topic is taught, students should do the relevant questions from past papers — not whole papers, which will be full of material they have not met. This builds familiarity with exam wording early, and it means the first full paper in Year 13 does not feel foreign.

Year 13, autumn term is still mostly topic work, because the final content is being taught. Students should start using the official formula booklet in all practice, and make sure the formulae that are not in the booklet are fully learnt.

Year 13, January to Easter is when full papers begin: roughly one complete set of three papers every two weeks, marked and logged. Easter to the exams is for the final rehearsal — the most recent papers your child can get, sat in the morning at the same time as the real exam, with the error log driving every revision session in between. My guide to how hard A-level maths is explains why this spaced, retrieval-based approach works so well for maths.

Most past-paper mistakes are about timing and honesty, not maths. The good news is that they are all fixable, and a parent can spot most of them simply by asking what happened after the paper was finished.

If your child is working hard on papers but the marks are not moving, it is usually one of these. And if the gap is bigger than a few marks, my guide to A-level maths grade boundaries shows how to turn a mock total into a precise target.