The General Certificate of Education Advanced Level (or simply A Levels) is a globally recognised pre-university qualification. Before coming to the University of Bristol, I self-taught myself 4 A Level subjects.

I will discuss the viability of teaching yourself A Levels as an alternative to regular school. I’ll consider various aspects of this approach, starting with cost. But first I’ll give a short introduction as to why one would choose to do this, beginning with my own story.

My story

I attended a gymnasium in Lithuania, a type of upper secondary school that roughly translates to sixth-form college in the UK. In Lithuania, we do 12 years of school as opposed to the UK’s 13. The duration of an undergraduate university degree is different, too. 4 years in Lithuania versus the UK’s three for a Bachelor’s degree. Understandably, this results in slightly different knowledge levels of first years in the two countries. For this reason (and probably a bunch of others) some institutions in the UK choose not to accept the Lithuanian school leaving qualification, the Brandos atestatas.

I set my eyes on studying in the United Kingdom way back in year 1 or 2 of gymnasium (year 9 or 10 out of 12). I noticed that a few of the institutions I was considering weren’t too fond of Brandos atestatas. These universities wouldn’t even consider applicants with that qualification. Instead, they suggest applying after finishing one year of university in Lithuania.

There was another issue. The Lithuanian Language and Literature exam is essentially compulsory in Lithuanian schools. I enjoy reading, a lot, but I could never analyse the assigned texts in quite the right way. Therefore I knew the exam would mess up my overall average and since UK universities give considerable weight to the average score in the Brandos atestatas, that was a problem.

Keeping all that in mind, I started noticing my Maths grades gradually dropping as well. I started looking for extra material and ended up buying some Edexcel Mathematics textbooks. I immediately noticed that these were (in my opinion) much easier to follow than my school textbooks. Soon after, I discovered that I can teach myself the content and take the exam as a private candidate at the local British Council. I ended up taking 3 A Levels alongside school.

Why would you do it?

Teaching yourself 3-4 subjects, something that, at school, is taught by professional teachers over two years, is not an easy task. Do not do this if you don’t have intrinsic motivation to study. I’ll go more into detail into the motivation and organisational skills required for self-teaching in another post. Self-teaching could appeal to you if either of these statements is true:

• There’s something that prevents you from being able to do well or even attend school
• Your local schools don’t offer qualifications of suitable quality
• Your local schools don’t offer subjects that you want to do

How?

Put simply, all you need to do is learn the content and take the exams. For international students (outside the UK) there are two main examination boards: Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE, formerly known as Cambridge International Examinations) and Edexcel International. I will focus on CAIE as it was the one I went with.

Exam boards

This depends entirely on the availability of exam centres in your country and the subject offerings of the different boards. You should already have a rough idea of what subjects you want to do so it’s a good idea to first check the respective subject lists of the two exam boards:

• Cambridge International AS and A Level subjects
• Edexcel International Advanced Levels

You may end up immediately discounting Edexcel as their subject list is quite short. Pay particular attention to the assessment requirements if you’re considering taking a lab science subject. Organising experiment-based exams for private candidates may be difficult for exam centres, so do your research and, if in doubt, contact your exam centre before starting to self-teach.

Next, you should check if the exam board you’re leaning towards even has centres in your country. I was forced to take all my exams with CIE as there was the only board available in my country. Check if there are exam centres in your country that take on private candidates:

• Find a Cambridge school – CAIE
• Find an international centre – Edexcel

Be sure to check the website of your local British Council too as they may still offer the exams but stay absent from the lists on the boards' websites.

If the two boards both offer the subjects you’re interested in and have centres in your country, you’ll have to make a choice. Having experience with only one of them, I cannot comment much. Rumours are that CAIE is more rigorous than Edexcel and therefore more respected but I doubt the validity of those. You should weigh up the different assessment paths (note the significant differences in the structure of Maths A Level), prices of textbooks and make the decision yourself.

The cost

This is an important consideration for many. Is it affordable? There are two significant parts to the total cost of self-teaching A Levels: textbooks and exam fees.

Textbooks

The lesser expense of the two, textbooks can be acquired quite cheaply online, especially if you’re willing to go with used ones. For example, let’s consider the CAIE Maths A Level. To be a candidate for the full General Certificate of Education Advanced Level in Mathematics you need to take:

• Pure Mathematics 1 (P1)
• Pure Mathematics 3 (P3)

plus one of the following combinations:

• Mechanics 1 (M1)
• Statistics 1 (S1)

or

• Mechanics 1 (M1)
• Mechanics 2 (M2)

or

• Statistics 1 (S1)
• Statistics 2 (S2)

So that’s a minimum of 4 textbooks. And if you’re wondering where Pure Maths 2 (P2) went, there’s an option to take Maths up to AS Level if you sit P1 and either of P2, M1 or S1.

The choice of textbooks is a wholly separate topic and I will discuss that later on but let’s suppose you want to do P1, P3, M1, S1 choose to go with the Oxford textbook series:

Prices include shipping to the UK and are in GBP rounded up to the nearest pound. Prices are correct at the time of writing.

So the full set of new textbooks will set you back about £94, £76 if you go with used ones. Keep in mind that the prices might fluctuate and the prices differ depending on the series/publisher. For Maths, there are more than 4 different series/edition combos you can go with. But I found the new Oxford (Oxford University Press) series to be the best.

Therefore, you should expect to spend about a hundred pounds on textbooks if we add a small safety margin on top.

Exam fees

This is the big one. Let’s continue with our Maths example. You will need to sit 4 papers:

These are roughly what I paid at my local centre. Consider these a very rough guide as they depend entirely on your exam centre. Courier expenses probably will vary the most as these depend on where the exam centre is located and how many other private candidates will split the fee with you. Also, it matters whether you’re sitting all the papers in one exam series or are splitting them up. Courier fees will be high and can’t be avoided – the exam scripts have to be shipped as soon as possible, preferably with a 1-2 day delivery service to the UK and that costs a lot.

So if we round up to £500 just to be safe we end up with a £600 total for the full CAIE Mathematics A Level. If we assume that you’ll be taking the standard three subjects at A Level and the other two cost roughly the same amount, we are looking at about 1,800 pounds total. Considering you’re expecting to pay upwards of £9,250 for a year of university, this is not that much.

Summary

So it seems that self-teaching A Levels is entirely possible and quite cost-effective. Whether it is preferable is a different topic.

The point of this post was to introduce self-teaching A Levels as an alternative to school. It is possible but I’d dissuade you from doing this unless you have no other option.