The exam board AQA has said that it no longer anticipates its first digital GCSE exams to be sat from 2026.
Last year, the exam board proposed that the reading and listening components of GCSE Italian and Polish would be the first to be sat digitally, with digital mocks from 2025 followed by exams the following year if regulators approved the plan.
However, the exam board has said today that it is continuing to talk to regulators, school leaders, teachers and exams officers, and now plans to introduce digital assessments for the Italian and Polish GCSEs at a later date.
An AQA spokesperson said: “As we continue to engage the sector and Ofqual, and appreciating that this is also an election year, we will need to wait a little longer to be able to confirm an exact approach with schools and colleges. So we’ve decided that digital Italian and Polish exams will begin a bit later.”
The exam board said it recognised that it “must get this right and maintain public confidence in our exam system, as well as give schools and colleges proper notice before making changes”.
AQA added: “We will update when we can on a revised date for implementing these exams.”
The spokesperson said that it was still the ambition that students will be able to sit digital exams for a major subject by 2030.
The AQA has also announced today that it would launch a personalised digital maths test this summer in a bid to save teachers time.
The test has been designed for students in the first few years of secondary school or those preparing to study towards a maths GCSE resit.
It comes after less than a quarter of students who retook their GCSE maths in the latest November exams achieved the grade 4 that they needed to pass.
The announcement also comes in the same week a report warned that disadvantaged primary and secondary pupils are still further behind their peers in maths than they were before the pandemic.
Insight into trickiest maths concepts
After the personalised digital test, a student will receive a learning module that will allow them to strengthen their areas of weakness.
AQA is also working on how this test data can be used at a large scale so that, for example, multi-academy trusts can see mathematical concepts students are struggling with across a wide number of schools.
The exam board has said that the test will be fully funded by AQA and available to all schools in England from June, whether or not they are AQA customers.
Schools and colleges will be able to register to use the tool from next month.
Test aims to ’transform support for students’
In the test, each student will answer between 30 and 40 questions from a bank of around 150 questions. The student’s response will then be analysed and the test then offers the next question suited to their learning needs.
Students will be able to access the 20-minute test using a laptop or touch-screen device and the test will have a choice of five topics: numbers, algebra, proportions, graphs or shapes.
Colin Hughes, AQA CEO, said that the test would ”transform support for students and help teachers quickly identify gaps in conceptual understanding”.
He added: “We know that many students struggle in GCSE maths because they don’t have a firm understanding of its fundamental concepts. Students have told us that they find the new test engaging, since it offers rapid feedback that tells them what they need to work on.”
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