Subject-level conditions and guidance for new French, German and Spanish GCSEs

Audience

This consultation is open to anyone who may wish to make representation but may be of most interest to:

• awarding organisations which offer GCSEs in French, German or Spanish
• teachers of GCSE French, German or Spanish
• schools, colleges and other exam centres
• students

New subject content

In November 2019, the Department for Education (DfE) announced that it would be convening an independent expert panel to develop potential changes to the subject content for GCSE French, German and Spanish. The proposed subject content was subject to a 10-week public consultation between March 2021 and May 2021.

In January 2022, following review of the consultation responses and wider stakeholder feedback, DfE published the new GCSE French, German and Spanish subject content.

DfE also confirmed that the new qualifications will be available for first teaching from September 2024, with first assessments in summer 2026.

Assessment arrangements

Ofqual reviewed the requirements for assessing the proposed new content, which the exam boards offering GCSE qualifications in French, German and Spanish must follow. We published a consultation seeking views on our assessment proposals at the same time as the DfE consulted on its proposed subject content.

Also in January 2022, having considered the responses to our public consultation, we confirmed that we had decided to implement our proposals. This means that the arrangements for assessing the revised GCSEs in French, German and Spanish will be based on:

• revised assessment objectives (AOs), which set out the percentage of qualification marks that must be awarded for each aspect of assessment
• continued use of tiered assessments, requiring students to be entered to a single tier across all assessments
• continued use of non-exam assessment (NEA) to focus on the assessment of speaking skills, which make up 25% of the total marks for the qualification

This consultation

This consultation on the proposed subject level conditions and guidance (SLC&G), covers the regulatory requirements that must be followed in all new GCSE qualifications in French, German and Spanish.