GCSE maths past papers are an essential part of every teacher’s toolkit for exam prep. A wide variety of materials across both foundation and higher tiers ensures students have a full understanding of what to expect when the time comes to head into exam halls.

But it’s important to make sure you’re providing your students with the most relevant materials. While covering the same topics, each exam board has its own approach to how exams and questions are structured, so it’s important you’re only using papers from the one that matches your school’s.

In this guide, we’ll look specifically at where to find AQA GCSE maths past papers, including what resources the exam board itself has to offer and other popular third-party sources of papers.

Official AQA GCSE maths past papers – what’s available?

A natural place to start when looking for AQA maths GCSE past papers is the company’s own website. This offers a range of recent higher and foundation papers, as well as mark schemes and guidance to help plan lessons and revision. Papers from all three exams up to 2024 are available as printable PDFs.

The site also offers access to examiner’s reports, allowing you to see directly which previous questions and topics students found easiest and most difficult. This can help you plan lessons to focus more on areas that have proven difficult for exam-takers in the past.

While there are several advantages to using the AQA website, such as the additional context and resources that are available for past papers and the authority the site offers, you may find a few limitations. Navigation can be tricky, with a lack of topic-based filtering and minimal guidance to help you find the most relevant resources.

This is why it pays to have multiple sources of past papers to rely on when preparing students for exams.

Third-party AQA GCSE maths past paper providers compared

Many of the same past papers are also available to download from a variety of third-party sites, together with supporting materials such as formula sheets and marking schemes. However, they may also provide additional resources that can give further context or break down papers by topic.

Some of the best options to consider include:

Conclusion: Preparing students for AQA maths exams

It’s important to remember that even when using official sources of past papers, the layout and focus of exams change. For example, until 2022, AQA maths papers typically began with multiple-choice questions, but this approach shifted toward more accessible open-response questions from 2023. AQA noted this was because “evidence has shown

students can find them difficult at the start of the paper”.

Therefore, if you’re using older papers, you may want to remind students that their real papers may differ slightly in structure.

Access to past papers can be particularly useful for calculator papers, as it can show students exactly what functionality they’ll need to know in order to gain full marks. AQA Paper 2 and Paper 3 are calculator-heavy, so students should be practicing with the same model they’ll use in the hall, such as the ClassWiz fx-83/85GT CW+.