The calculator question: what to buy and what it can do

The short answer: almost every A-Level Maths student needs one calculator, a standard scientific model like the Casio fx-991CW+ (or whichever exam-board-approved equivalent your school recommends), which costs somewhere in the £15–£35 range depending on retailer. A colour graphic calculator like the fx-CG50, at closer to £90–£120, is worth the extra money for a smaller group — Further Maths students, and anyone who leans heavily on visualising functions or statistical distributions — but it is not a requirement for single A-Level Maths, whatever the shop display next to it suggests. I'd rather talk most families out of the expensive one than let them buy it out of anxiety.

What the exam actually allows

Start here, because it rules out most of the wrong purchases before you've spent anything. JCQ (the body that sets the rules exam boards follow) doesn't publish a list of banned handsets — instead it defines what a calculator must not do. No internet access, no way to communicate with another device, no QWERTY keyboard, and nothing with retrievable stored information beyond built-in scientific constants. Calculators with a computer algebra system, the kind that solves equations symbolically rather than numerically, aren't permitted either. Graphical calculators are allowed across all three boards unless a specification says otherwise, which for A-Level Maths it doesn't.

Some models now ship with an "exam mode" that a student switches on before sitting a paper, which clears stored data and disables anything the rules don't allow. If your calculator has one, get your child into the habit of using it for every timed past paper practised at home, not just the real thing — it's one less thing to fumble with in the exam hall.

The one calculator nearly everyone needs

For the overwhelming majority of A-Level Maths students, a standard scientific calculator is both the minimum requirement and, in practice, all they'll ever need. Casio's current model in this range is the fx-991CW+, which replaced the long-running fx-991CW and fx-991EX lines earlier this year. It handles everything the pure, statistics and mechanics content actually demands: equation solving, complex numbers, matrices, a table mode for plotting values without a graph, and statistical regression. None of that is exotic — it's the same tier of calculator GCSE students already own, which is worth knowing before you buy a second one unnecessarily.

What surprises me, marking students' working every week, is how few of them use half of what's already on the calculator they own. The equation solver and the table mode in particular go untouched by students who then spend three minutes doing by hand what the calculator would do in three seconds — time that matters when a paper is genuinely tight. If your child already has a scientific Casio from GCSE, five minutes going through its menu properly, ideally in that first fortnight of Year 12 before habits set, is worth more than money spent on a new one.

When the graphic calculator is genuinely worth it

The fx-CG50 and similar colour graphic calculators do everything the standard model does, plus a full graphing screen — you can plot functions, see intersections, and visualise statistical distributions directly rather than sketching them from values. For Further Maths, where the content leans harder on visualising more complex functions and matrix transformations, I think it earns its price. For students who are visual learners and genuinely struggle to picture what a function looks like from an equation alone, it can also help, though that's a smaller and harder-to-predict group.

For everyone else doing single A-Level Maths, I'd save the money. The graphing screen doesn't unlock marks the standard calculator can't get to — the paper tests whether you can sketch and reason about a graph yourself, not whether a screen can draw it faster than you can. I've taught plenty of A* students who never owned one, and it's rarely the calculator that's holding back a student who's still losing marks to the same handful of recurring mistakes.

What not to buy

Skip anything marketed as a "CAS" or "computer algebra system" calculator — these solve equations symbolically and are explicitly barred from UK exams, so an expensive one bought by mistake is money wasted twice over, once on the calculator and once on the replacement. Skip the older fx-991EX too, not because it's banned but because Casio has moved on from it and it's simply the previous generation of the same £20 tier — there's no reason to pay collector prices for last year's model when the current one does more. And don't rely on a phone's calculator app as a backup for revision at home; if a student only ever practises on a touchscreen keyboard, the physical button layout in the exam will slow them down on the day, which is its own small, avoidable cost.

Buying it at the right time

The best time to sort this out is before term starts, not during the first week when everyone else is also trying to buy one and the school's recommended model is briefly out of stock everywhere. If your child is moving from GCSE into Year 12, check first whether their existing calculator already meets the A-Level requirement — for most standard scientific models it will, and that's one less thing to buy over a summer that's already got enough on the list. If they're starting Further Maths or you've decided the graphic calculator is genuinely the right call, get it early enough that they've spent real time on it before it matters, ideally before the mock season makes it a distraction rather than in the summer holidays. A calculator a student hasn't practised with is worse than a slightly less capable one they know inside out.