Year 11 Exam Dates 2027: The Full GCSE Timetable by Board

The GCSE summer 2027 exam series runs from 10 May to 18 June 2027, on the single national timetable AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas all sit, confirmed in JCQ's June 2027 key-dates document. Schools must enter every UK candidate by 21 February 2027, and the deadline for extra time, a reader or a scribe falls on 21 March 2027.

When Do the GCSE Exams Actually Start and Finish in 2027?

JCQ — the Joint Council for Qualifications, through which AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas coordinate the summer timetable — publishes one key-dates document for the whole June 2027 series. It states the first examination on the common timetable as Monday 10 May 2027, and the final one as Friday 18 June 2027. Both dates come from that document directly, not from a secondary summary of it.

Those two dates hold for every GCSE candidate in the country, whichever of the four boards a school enters through — the mechanism behind that is explained in the next section. A parent does not need to know which board their child sits to get the right answer for when exams start and finish: it is the same window either way.

Most of what a family finds about these dates repeats the headline opening date without stating where it came from, or confirms two of the four boards while leaving the other two as an instruction to check the board's own site. The table further down this page states the position for all four, sourced to each board's own document rather than to JCQ alone.

Is the Timetable the Same Whatever Exam Board My Child's School Uses?

Yes, for the dates that decide a results-day grade. JCQ operates what it calls a common timetable: the four English GCSE-awarding bodies agree, ahead of each series, that a given subject and tier is examined on the same date and at the same time across every board, so a school entering GCSE Maths through one board is never examining it on a different day from a school entering it through another. That is what makes it possible to publish one national date for the first GCSE exam and one for the last, rather than four separate answers.

This matters in two practical ways. First, a family that does not know, or does not want to have to find out, which board a school uses can still plan around the dates on this page with confidence, because the two headline dates do not depend on it. Second, it means the four boards' own key-dates documents, checked individually below, are not four competing sources to reconcile; they are four independent confirmations of the same underlying date, which is exactly why finding all four in agreement is worth more than reading one.

AQA, Pearson, OCR, WJEC/Eduqas: Are All Four Boards' 2027 Dates Actually Confirmed?

A date is only as good as the document it comes from, and the four boards do not all describe their June 2027 timetable in the same words. Reading each board's own document directly, rather than a secondary summary of it, shows exactly how confirmed each one is.

All four boards' own documents state Monday 10 May 2027 and Friday 18 June 2027 directly, not only through JCQ. Three of the four go a step further and independently restate Wednesday 23 June 2027 as the contingency day too, in their own words, rather than leaving a reader to take it on JCQ's authority alone; AQA's is the most detailed of the three, telling centres in its own words that candidates “must remain available” until that date. Pearson's document is the only one of the four that does not restate the contingency day itself, pointing readers to a separate key-dates document instead. AQA's document is also the only one of the four not explicitly labelled “final” — it is marked Version 1.0 — which is worth knowing if a school's own paperwork still cites an earlier AQA draft; nothing in it contradicts the other three boards' dates, only the label differs.

Once the calendar is settled, the date on this page is not the only thing worth knowing about a specific subject. Our AQA GCSE Maths guide and AQA GCSE Chemistry guide go beyond the timetable into the actual paper structure and topic coverage for those two subjects.

What Is the GCSE Contingency Day, and Does It Actually Affect a Family's Summer Plans?

Wednesday 23 June 2027 — five days after the scheduled final exam on 18 June — is set aside by JCQ and the boards specifically for the possibility that national or significant local disruption forces a paper to be rescheduled. Both OCR's and WJEC/Eduqas's own timetable documents restate this date independently rather than simply pointing back to JCQ, which is a stronger basis for treating it as fixed than a single source would be.

Most candidates will never sit anything on the contingency day, and a school has no reason to mention it unless disruption actually happens. The practical point for a family is what not to do: treat 18 June as a safe date to book the first day of summer travel against. Until the contingency window has passed, a candidate whose paper could plausibly be affected by disruption is expected to remain available through 23 June, and a holiday booked to start on the 19th assumes that will not be needed.

When Is the Entry Deadline, and Does It Actually Matter to Parents?

21 February 2027, for UK-based centres. That figure comes independently from two places: Pearson Edexcel's own entry-fees table and OCR's own entry-fees table — both agree, which is a stronger basis for a single date than either alone. JCQ's key-dates document does not separately list an entries deadline in the extract checked for this page, so the claim rests on the two boards rather than a third confirmation. Pearson's document separately shows a later entry deadline of 21 March 2027 for its international centres; a UK school reading an international timetable by mistake would arrive a month early rather than late, so the distinction is worth keeping straight.

The deadline sits on a Sunday in 2027, which in practical terms means a school's exams office needs its entries finalised by the Friday before — 19 February 2027 — since nobody is filing paperwork over the weekend. This is not usually a parent's problem to manage directly; entries are the school's responsibility, not the family's. It becomes a parent's problem around a late subject change — a child moving tier, or adding or dropping a subject close to half-term — because Pearson's own document shows a late-entry window opening the very next day, 22 February 2027, with a further amendment-fee window from 22 April 2027 for changes made even later. A parent negotiating a late subject swap with a school has a real, sourced window to ask about, rather than an assumption that the deadline has simply passed.

If My Child Needs Extra Time, a Reader, or a Modified Paper, What Is the Actual Deadline?

There are two deadlines here, not one, and conflating them is the single easiest way to miss the earlier of the two. JCQ's June 2027 key-dates document sets 31 January 2027 as the deadline for ordering a modified paper — large print or Braille — through Access Arrangements Online, because those papers are physically produced to order and cannot be requested at short notice. Everything else that falls under access arrangements — extra time, a reader, a scribe, a word processor, rest breaks — has a separate, later deadline: 21 March 2027, for processing the application through the same system.

Both dates fall on a Sunday in 2027, so the working deadline in each case is the Friday before — 19 March 2027 for the general access-arrangements processing date. A school's SENCo or exams officer manages the application itself, but a parent who knows a child has a documented need is the one who has to start the conversation early enough for the school to act, and the phrase “access arrangements” on its own does not tell a parent which of the two dates applies to their child's situation.

This is also the gap our own GCSE resources hub leaves open rather than guess at: it states JCQ's headline dates for the June 2027 series but marks both the entries deadline and the access-arrangements processing deadline as unconfirmed, because neither could be lifted cleanly from the extract it was built from. Both are stated in full above, sourced directly to JCQ's document.

When Is GCSE Results Day 2027?

Thursday 19 August 2027. JCQ's key-dates document lists a separate, earlier date — Wednesday 18 August 2027 — as a restricted release to centres and schools only, so a school may have results a day before students do; the date that matters for a student checking their own results is the 19th.

How Does This Compare With the Mocks My Child Is Already Sitting?

Differently enough that the two calendars should never be read as one. Every date on this page is fixed nationally by JCQ and identical for a candidate in any school in the country, regardless of exam board — the table above shows how independently each board's own document confirms that. A mock exam is nothing like that: it is set entirely by each individual school, at whatever point in its own year it chooses, and the actual dates vary by weeks from one school to the next — our guide to when GCSE mocks actually happen sets out what that looks like school by school, rather than assuming one date applies everywhere.

The practical consequence is that a family can plan around every date on this page today, for any school, because none of them will move. A mock timetable has to be checked directly with the school, every year, because nothing about it is fixed in advance — and one school's own mock dates are not evidence for what another school, or the actual summer series, will do.

Checked 10 September 2026: every date above was read directly from AQA's, Pearson Edexcel's, OCR's and WJEC/Eduqas's own June 2027 examination timetable documents and JCQ's June 2027 key-dates document, not from a summary of any of them. Where a source document is a PDF, the text was extracted and read directly rather than taken from an automated summary.

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