Edexcel GCSE Maths Paper 1 2026 Review - Grade boundaries and predictions!

I think I'll walk back to another video. This time we're going to be just talking about my thoughts about the 2026 paper 1 higher tier for Edexcel because a few people asked me about grade boundaries, what I thought of the paper etc. Now I've actually had enough time to have a look at it. I just wanted to talk about exactly what I think and again we're going to end with what I think will happen with the grade boundaries and essentially how grade boundaries are calculated because it is quite complicated and there's a little bit of like misinformation online. So first of all some some nice successes. The first eight questions of the paper were really really typical of exam questions from previous years so it starts you know you have like a scatter graph interpreting that, you have solving a quadratic, you have that kind of stuff which again has come up so many times and realistically if you've prepared properly that should be okay and then also arithmetic series, multiplying decimals is like the most common question one or two from any paper one so that was really nice of them to put that in there so it felt quite similar. Question 10, the ratio question where it spoke about kind of like shapes and colours was very similar to a question from 2017 which was actually the final question of 2017 where there was a ratio between black and white shapes and then a ratio between squares and triangles and you had to work out what fraction of the shapes were black triangles or something like that. Again putting that at question 10 maybe that's a little bit tricky but again again if you've done all the past papers which is kind of the recommendation a lot of teachers and tutors will tell you, hopefully you would have seen it before and it wasn't too bad. Speaking about the very last question alternate segment theorem, some students say it's really hard some students say it's really easy, I think it really depends on if you've learnt the circle theorem proofs. Technically speaking on the spec you have to know how to prove basically all of the circle theorems and so if you've done that it was really really easy and just a free four marks for you because you know what the proof is you can just copy it down, essentially memory. If you try to work it out that's a bit hit and miss, you can get marks for like labelling different angles and stuff like that so I wouldn't worry too much because that was the only question that was really really tricky. The next thing, there was two questions that in terms of predicted I did these with my tuition students and with the students at school. So the first one was the histogram question which was probably the hardest question if you hadn't seen it before. It's the question where I said something like there are 10 more between 15 and 25 than there were between 0 and 15 and there was nothing along the y-axis so that was quite tricky but again with the students that I teach they knew how to do it because we had literally done that question, not the exact same numbers but a similar type of question in our lessons which was nice and the other one was when they gave you a triangle and you had to work at the value of tan x which again quite nice, it was quite lucky that we managed to do that. So again in terms of my recommendations if you watch my videos on how you would get a grade 9, which by the way is relevant if you're doing a 7 or 8 as well, it is about just finding hard questions and learning how to do them because those two questions were basically recycled from previous practice papers, mock papers etc. So now on to grade boundaries, what do I think the grade boundaries will be? Well the first thing I want to point out and what I want to make this really really really really clear is that grade boundaries are very very consistent in terms of the numbers of students that get grades 7, 8, 9 etc each year so the way that they want to do it is they want to make sure that getting a grade 9 in 2023 is the same level of difficulty as getting a grade 9 in 2026. It doesn't necessarily mean the same number of people will do that but it's saying that it's the same level of difficulty and they do this by taking into account things like SATS results as well, so they look at what the current cohort, what they're good at, what they're bad at and they take that into consideration when they do the grade boundaries. Now given that quite a few of the exams this this week so far have been said to be quite easy, maybe that just means that you know the exam boards think that we're going to do worse this year which is good which means the grade boundaries might not change that much but in terms of grade boundaries the other thing you have to keep in mind is whatever happened on paper one, whether you did really well or whether you did really badly, it doesn't guarantee what grade you've got in the future. So as you might be aware last year it was 90% for a grade 9 whereas most other years it's around 80 to 83. That could go up even further, for example when you go into A level, A level chemistry it's 95% for an A star which is the equivalent of a grade 9. So I think the grade boundaries will remain close-ish to the ones from last year, maybe go down slightly but what you should do is you should take the worst possible case and assume that. So if you need a 7 you want to pick the highest possible grade boundary for a 7 or at least the one that's come up so far which is around 60%. If you're aiming for grade 9 you should assume 90% and that's kind of the benchmark you should be aiming for. I mean ideally aim for 100% so that way you're kind of guaranteed to get a good grade but that's what you should keep in mind. In terms of our recommendations for paper 2 and 3 I know you probably aren't going to be revising it now because there's two more English papers, you know literature and language and there's two more science papers as well next week but for over the half term again go back and practice those hard questions. Now in terms of what topics do I think will come up, the few major ones that haven't come up so far, vectors, again it's definitely going to come up and it's either going to be a column vector question which is relatively difficult. If you look at last year's paper there was one where they gave you, it was something like 2a plus 3b equals 2c and they gave you what the vector a was, I can't remember the exact numbers and they gave you what the vector c was and you had to work out b and that was for four marks and again that was vaguely difficult for some students but I think vector geometry is quite likely. It didn't in 2025 so maybe in 2026. Another thing that could potentially come up is kind of quadratic sequences or simultaneous equations so the reason why I mention that is there was quite a lot of application in paper one and I think that's perhaps where they're moving towards so again the simultaneous equations where they might say something like they give you a cuboid and they tell you its volume and its surface area but they don't give you two of the dimensions so let's say this is x this is y and that's 7 then they tell you that the volume is equal to I don't know 184 and the surface area equals 208 and you have to solve for x and y I don't know something along those lines but the good news is again completing the square probably won't come up again and it's quite good that we got rid of the quadratic inequalities in paper one. It was a fairly tricky one because it was two quadratic inequalities you have to solve and then do an overlap but yeah in terms of grade boundaries regardless of what happened in paper one you need to forget about it and you need to use it as energy to move forward so what happens a lot of years is if students did really well on paper one they get more relaxed and they do worse in paper two and three which means they don't necessarily get the nine that they want or the eight that they want and the reverse happens if paper one went bad for you typically students do better in paper two and three because they try a lot harder they use it as motivation so regardless of if it went well but went bad you cannot assume that paper two and three will be easy remember they need to set a certain standard so if paper one was easy you should expect paper two and three to be harder so that way they can get kind of an average level of difficulty and that's true if you go back in previous years 2017 is a paper I've done fairly recently with my class paper one was really hard paper two and three were easier whereas in 2024 paper one was quite easy paper two and three was a lot harder so keep that in mind keep working and again with great boundaries just assume it's as bad as last year as in as high as last year and work under the assumption you need to get 90 plus for a nine you know 80 plus for an eight and so on and that will really really help you stay motivated