Maths GCSE requirement for A level Biology

[DorisLessingsCat]

DD applied to two colleges and one sixth form for A levels, including biology.

College A (her preferred choice) asked for a 6 in maths.
College B and the sixth form asked for a 5 in maths.

DD got a 5 and College A has said she can't take Biology. She's gutted as it's her number one subject. She's confident that she can cope with the maths element in the Biology syllabus and really, really really wants to go to College A. Does anyone have any advice or insight on how to approach them? They still want her as a student but offered her Environmental Science instead of Biology, but she wants to go on to health/sports/exercise science after A levels.

(For additional context, she got an 8 in Biology, a 7 in Chemistry and a 6 in Physics, as well as a bunch of other 7s and 8s in the rest of her GCSEs).

Thanks @WombatChocolate I guess we will see.

The thing is, I think her maths is good enough. Her own maths teacher thinks it's fine and if she had stayed in the (very high performing) sixth form connected to her school they would have taken her without question.

I just find it odd that so much depends on a single exam result. At 16!

Interestingly I hadn’t realised that strong maths was such an issue in Alevel biology. My DD just scraped her AS biology to stay on her second year of AL and after reviewing her papers I can see she’s dropped marks on every single maths question so we’ve now bought the CGP book for maths for AL biology and are going to be helping her with it. I wish I’d known this last year as she’s ok at maths just not doing it in her other subjects so she’s got rusty. I hope your DD does well and enjoys her new college.

My DS did Biology A level, I can't remember any maths in it really?

Well DD just did it and she tells me there was, mainly statistics and working stuff out from graphs etc I think.
I am rubbish at Maths and I couldn't help with a few things she asked me to and even DH (who is good at Maths) had to google a couple of things

Must be a different board, there was only quite basic maths in his.

Biology really has basic level maths, mostly around calculating percentages/gradients/surface area/etc. No real algebra/ complex equations. So I think she'll be fine as long as she keeps ups with some form of maths and learns how to use a calculator properly.

She may need to understand things like standard deviation (sampling) but they won't be asked to calculate it themselves; same with statistical tests (they will be given equations to use in the data booklet).

Exam boards have lots of free online pdfs of maths examples for the subject. Well worth looking through the correct board.

I’ve got A level maths ok it was 30yrs ago so I’m tad rusty but we both had to look up how to do some of the maths being asked on a bunch of biology past papers. DD got. G6 predicted an 7 on her gcse and is needing support to pick up more points on her biology A L after a scrape through the As level. It’s not super easy to some of us I wish last year I’d had more awareness that she’d need support on the maths.