GCSE History 2026: Every Exam Board Compared

GCSE History is a linear qualification set by five specifications in England and Wales: AQA 8145, Pearson Edexcel 1HI0, OCR A J410, OCR B J411 and WJEC Eduqas C100QS. AQA and Eduqas examine it across two components; OCR and Edexcel use three. Total written exam time ranges from four hours to four hours and 40 minutes depending on the board. The 2026 papers run from 7 May to 17 June, with results released to candidates on 20 August 2026.

That variation is the reason a single "GCSE History" revision plan does not work. A student on Edexcel sits three papers and meets sources in two of them; a student on OCR B sits a one-hour paper about a physical site near their school. This page sets out what each specification actually requires, with every figure taken from the board's own published specification. If you want the wider subject picture, our GCSE tuition hub covers every subject we teach, and our History tutor page explains how one-to-one lessons are structured.

Which GCSE History specification is your school entered for?

There are five current specifications. They are not variations on a theme: the number of papers, the total qualification mark and the amount of time in the exam hall all differ. The table below is drawn from each board's published summary of assessment.

The quickest way to settle which one applies is the statement of entry the school issues in the spring term. It carries the entry code, and for Edexcel and OCR that code identifies the individual option as well as the board. Edexcel's paper codes run 1HI0/10–13 for Paper 1, 1HI0/2A–2W for Paper 2 and 1HI0/30–33 for Paper 3, so the code alone tells a tutor exactly which four topics a student has been entered for.

One boundary is worth naming plainly, because sibling pages and revision sites routinely blur it. Eduqas is the WJEC specification available in England; WJEC's Wales qualification is separate, and WJEC has confirmed that for 2026 entry to Year 10 in Wales, learners must not be placed on the legacy specification and should instead take the new GCSE History teaching from 2026. The legacy specification continues to be assessed through summer 2027, with a resit opportunity in January 2028. A Welsh student starting Year 10 in September 2026 is therefore on a different qualification from the one their older sibling sat.

How much written exam time does each GCSE History board set?

Add the papers up and the boards separate. AQA sets four hours flat, in two two-hour sittings. Edexcel sets four hours and 40 minutes across three papers — 40 minutes more than AQA, spread over an extra exam day. OCR A also totals four hours; OCR B totals four hours and 30 minutes. Eduqas totals four hours but splits them into four separate sittings, two of an hour each for the depth studies and then 45 minutes and an hour and 15 minutes for the breadth papers.

This matters for two practical reasons. The first is stamina. A student who has only ever written under 50-minute classroom conditions is not prepared for a two-hour AQA paper, and the drop-off in quality in the final 20 minutes is one of the most visible patterns in mock scripts. The second is scheduling: three shorter Edexcel papers means three separate revision peaks, whereas AQA's two papers concentrate everything into two. Our tutors build the timed-writing schedule around whichever shape applies, and the GCSE revision timescales guide on our blog sets out how far in advance that has to start.

Which paper carries the source and interpretation marks?

All boards use the same four assessment objectives, because the Department for Education's GCSE subject content fixes them: AO1 knowledge and understanding at 35%, AO2 explanation and analysis using second-order concepts at 35%, AO3 analysing and evaluating sources at 15%, and AO4 analysing and evaluating interpretations at 15%. Every specification lands on 35/35/15/15 overall. What differs — and it differs a great deal — is where inside the qualification those marks sit.

Read down the Edexcel rows and something jumps out. Paper 2 carries no AO3 and no AO4 at all: 40% of the qualification with not one source and not one interpretation in it. Every mark on that paper is knowledge and second-order analysis. Paper 3, by contrast, holds the entire AO4 allocation — all 15% of the interpretations marks sit in a single 1 hour 30 minute paper worth 30%. An Edexcel student who is weak on interpretations is not weak across the course; they are weak in one exam, and that is a far more tractable problem.

OCR B splits it differently again. All the AO3 source weight is concentrated in History Around Us, the one-hour paper about a physical site, while the thematic and British depth paper carries no AO3 whatsoever. AQA is the most evenly spread of the three, and is the only one of them to put both AO3 and AO4 into both papers.

The skill itself is consistent wherever it appears. Students are asked to infer meaning beyond what a source literally states, to judge how useful a source is for a specific enquiry by weighing content against provenance — who produced it, when, for what purpose, for what audience — and to explain why two sources or two interpretations differ. The single most common wasted answer dismisses a source as biased and stops there. A biased source is evidence of the attitude that produced it, and saying so is what moves an answer out of the lower bands. That reframing is coachable in a handful of lessons, and knowing which paper it pays off in tells you when to schedule them.

Where are the SPaG marks in GCSE History?

Spelling, punctuation, grammar and the use of specialist terminology are marked separately from the history, and the boards treat them very differently. AQA folds four SPaG marks into each paper, so they sit inside the 168 total. Edexcel awards eight SPaG marks across the qualification, also inside its 168, and its paper weightings are published as applying to assessed content before SPaG is added.

OCR B is the outlier and the one most often missed. All ten of its SPaG marks fall in Paper 2, History Around Us, and OCR states plainly that they are in addition to the total 200 marks for the assessment and are not included in the percentage weightings shown. In OCR's words, 5 per cent of the marks in the specification as a whole credit the accuracy of spelling, punctuation and grammar. For a student sitting History Around Us, a scrappily written answer is not a rounding error; it is ten marks that are available for handwriting quality on an extended response, in a paper that already carries the whole of the AO3 source weight.

Practically, this is the cheapest mark gain on the paper. It requires no additional content revision at all — only that extended answers are written in accurate sentences with the subject vocabulary spelled correctly. We build a short specialist-vocabulary list per option and test it, because "chronology", "interpretation", "significance" and the option-specific nouns are exactly what the SPaG descriptors reward.

What topic options can a school choose at GCSE History?

Schools choose options, not students, and the choice is made before Year 10 begins. The named lists below come from each board's specification and are what your child is actually sitting.

AQA 8145. Paper 1 Section A offers four period studies: America, 1840–1895: Expansion and consolidation; Germany, 1890–1945: Democracy and dictatorship; Russia, 1894–1945: Tsardom and communism; and America, 1920–1973: Opportunity and inequality. Paper 1 Section B offers five wider world depth studies on conflict and tension, covering the First World War, the inter-war years, East and West after 1945, Asia, and the Gulf and Afghanistan. Paper 2 Section A has three thematic studies — Health and the people, Power and the people, and Migration, empires and the people — and Section B has four British depth studies: Norman England, the reign of Edward I, Elizabethan England and Restoration England.

Edexcel 1HI0. Paper 1 pairs a thematic study with a historic environment in four combinations: Crime and punishment with Whitechapel; Medicine in Britain with the British sector of the Western Front; Warfare and British society with London and the Second World War; and Migrants in Britain with Notting Hill. Paper 2 combines one of four British depth studies with one of five period studies, and Paper 3 offers four modern depth studies: Russia and the Soviet Union, Weimar and Nazi Germany, Mao's China, and the USA 1954–75.

OCR B J411. Three thematic studies (The People's Health, Crime and Punishment, Migrants to Britain, each c.1250 to present), three British depth studies (The Norman Conquest, The Elizabethans, Britain in Peace and War), three period studies (Viking Expansion, The Mughal Empire, The Making of America) and three world depth studies (The First Crusade, Aztecs and the Spanish Conquest, Living under Nazi Rule). History Around Us is a site chosen by the centre, which is why two schools on the same specification can be studying entirely different buildings.

OCR A J410 is organised as seven period-study-with-non-British-depth combinations, three thematic studies and three British depth studies with a historic environment. WJEC Eduqas offers four British and four non-British studies in depth, which must come from different eras, plus four period studies and four thematic studies.

Two consequences follow. Weimar and Nazi Germany appears in some form on almost every board, which is why generic revision resources cluster around it — and why a student on an unfashionable option finds far less material online. And because the historic environment is centre-chosen on OCR B and paired to a fixed site on Edexcel, no national revision guide can cover it; that content has to come from the school or from a tutor who reads the specification. Our comparison of AQA, Edexcel and OCR across GCSE subjects looks at how the same pattern plays out beyond History.

How many students sat GCSE History in 2025, and how did they do?

History remains one of the largest optional GCSEs, but it is shrinking. JCQ recorded 306,759 History entries in summer 2025, down 5.7% on 2024 — a steeper fall than English literature, which dropped 1.0%, and the opposite of Geography, which rose 1.8% to 302,706 and is now within four thousand entries of overtaking it. History and Geography are close to swapping places as the larger humanities subject.

Across all GCSE subjects in 2025, JCQ reported 21.9% of grades at 7/A and above and 67.4% at 4/C and above, from 6,160,034 entries in England, Northern Ireland and Wales. Ofqual's England-only figures for the same series were 21.8% at grade 7 and above and 67.1% at grade 4 and above. Those are the benchmarks against which a History grade is read, and they have barely moved in two years.

The falling entry is worth taking seriously if your child is applying to a selective sixth form. A smaller cohort does not make the paper easier — grading is designed to hold standards steady — but it does mean fewer students in a year group with the essay-writing practice that History gives, which is precisely the skill A-level History, Politics, English and Law all assume on arrival. Our A-level History page sets out what that step up involves.

Why do GCSE History grade boundaries move between option combinations?

Because there is no single GCSE History paper, there is no single grade boundary. AQA published 153 separate boundary rows for specification 8145 in the June 2025 series — one for each combination of period study, wider world depth study, thematic study and British depth study a school could enter.

The spread across those rows is wide. Out of 168 marks, the grade 9 boundary ranged from 108 to 126 depending on the combination, and the grade 4 boundary ranged from 50 to 68. That is an 18-mark span at both ends, roughly 11% of the paper. Two students with identical raw marks on different option combinations can come out a grade apart, and this is not an anomaly to be corrected: it is the mechanism by which boards compensate for option combinations that turned out harder or easier in that particular series.

One published example makes it concrete. On option combination 8145AA in June 2025, a grade 9 needed 114 of 168 marks, a grade 8 needed 102 and a grade 4 needed 57. The gap between grade 8 and grade 9 was 12 marks — a single well-argued extended answer. Boundaries for the June 2026 series are published by AQA at 8.00am on results day, 20 August 2026, and cannot be known before then. Any site quoting 2026 boundaries in advance is quoting a guess.

It also helps to know what the scale itself is anchored to. Ofqual's published alignment for the 9 to 1 grades is that the bottom of a grade 7 is comparable to the bottom of the old grade A, the bottom of a grade 4 to the bottom of the old grade C, and the bottom of a grade 1 to the bottom of the old grade G. A parent translating a History target into the letters they sat themselves should read a 7 as an A and a 4 as a C.

The practical use of this is target-setting. A tutor who checks the boundary history for the specific option combination a student is entered for can set a raw-mark target on past papers rather than a vague "aim for a 7", and that turns every mock into a measurement.

When are the 2026 GCSE History exams and results?

The dates below are from the JCQ key dates schedule for the June 2026 examination series and apply to every board sitting on the common timetable.

Two of those dates are routinely missed by families. The access-arrangements deadline of 21 March 2026 is the last point at which extra time or a scribe can be processed, and it falls before most schools have finished their mocks — evidence of need has to be gathered well before then. And the contingency day of 24 June 2026 is a real commitment: students must remain available for it even after their last scheduled paper, which rules out booking travel for the week beginning 22 June.

How a GCSE History tutor should use the specification

Everything above is only useful if it changes what happens in a lesson. In practice it changes four things.

It changes what gets taught. A tutor who knows the entry code knows the four options, and can stop covering the periods the student will never be examined on. It changes the order: if a student is on Edexcel and interpretations are the weakness, Paper 3 becomes the priority, because that is where all 15% of AO4 lives. It changes the timing of timed practice, which is built to the real paper length — two hours for AQA, 1 hour 20 minutes for Edexcel Paper 1 — rather than a generic hour. And it changes target-setting, because raw-mark targets come from the boundary history for that specific option combination.

Our GCSE History tutors work one-to-one online, starting with a diagnostic session that reviews recent school work and identifies whether the gap is knowledge, second-order analysis, source handling or written accuracy — four different problems that produce the same disappointing mark. Lessons then alternate topic review with timed writing against the real paper structure, marked with the board's own descriptors. Students regularly move from grade 4–5 to grade 7–9 over a sustained programme, and Leading Tuition is rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot by families across the UK. For students continuing into sixth form, the same tutors cover OCR A-level History.

Frequently Asked Questions About GCSE History