Which Subjects You Cannot Resit Privately

A private candidate is someone entered for exams through a school or college where they are not enrolled. Which subjects are open to them is decided by each exam board and published, and the boards do not agree. AQA lists 31 of its 44 A-level specifications as available to private candidates. Pearson Edexcel publishes no subject bar at all. Cambridge International rules out every syllabus carrying coursework. Four boards, four different published answers, retrieved on 16 August 2026.

That variation is the practical point of this page. “You cannot resit Art privately” is not a fact about Art. It is a fact about one board's published list, one centre's willingness, or both — and the answer can change when you change board.

Do the Exam Boards Publish a Subject List At All?

Start here, because the rest of the page depends on it. Two of the five boards a UK private candidate is likely to deal with publish a per-specification position — AQA on its private-candidate AS and A-level page, Pearson on its GCE subjects-with-conditions page. Three do not, and publish a general rule instead. Where a board publishes nothing subject by subject, the honest answer is that the board has not stated a position — not that the subject is barred.

Only one of those five — Cambridge International — publishes a sentence that begins “They cannot”. Its wording, on its guidance for centres accepting private candidates, is unambiguous: “Private candidates must be able to meet the full requirements of any assessment for which they are entered. They cannot enter for any syllabuses that include the submission of coursework.” Everything else on this page is softer than that, and should be read as softer.

Note also AQA's territorial limit, which catches out students abroad: “You can only become a private candidate with us in the UK. Exams are not available for private candidates to sit outside the UK.” That is a hard bar on where, not on what.

The Thirteen A-Levels Missing From AQA's List

AQA's availability page is headed “Available specifications” and, beneath it, lists 31 A-level specifications with the restrictions attached to each. Setting that list against AQA's current qualifications listing, which carries 44 A-level specifications, leaves 13 that AQA offers but does not name on the private-candidate page. Those counts come from enumerating both published lists rather than from a figure AQA prints.

The Business (New) (7138) row matters more than it looks. It is a current AQA specification, and its absence is almost certainly an artefact rather than a policy: every row of the availability table carries an exam-series column reading June 2023. A table stamped June 2023 will not have caught a specification introduced afterwards.

That is the honest way to read the other twelve as well. AQA does not write “Art and Design is not available to private candidates”. It writes, on its main private-candidate page, that “Not all specifications or qualifications are available to private candidates”, and then publishes a list that does not include them. Absence from a list is evidence. It is weaker evidence than a stated condition, and considerably weaker than a stated prohibition, and a page that reports it as a flat “cannot” is overstating what the board actually said.

Where AQA Says Yes and Attaches a Condition

The larger category is not exclusion. It is the specification AQA lists as available with a condition written against it, and the conditions are far more specific than the general talk of “coursework subjects being difficult” that fills most guides.

The ten-candidate rule deserves a moment. For A-level and AS French, German and Spanish, AQA offers two ways to run the speaking test: option T, where a teacher at the centre conducts it, and option V, where an AQA examiner visits. A private candidate arriving alone can only realistically use option T, because a centre needs at least 10 candidates for that unit before it can enter for the visiting examiner at all. If the centre has no qualified speaker of the language on staff and no cohort of its own, the subject stalls there — not because AQA refuses the entry, but because neither delivery route is open.

Environmental Science carries the most administrative condition of the set. AQA requires the centre to submit a non-exam assessment, fieldwork and live performance centre declaration form confirming that the opportunity to complete the fieldwork was provided. A centre that has never entered a private candidate for the subject is being asked to sign something, which is a different order of ask from booking a desk in a hall.

One consolation buried in the AS science rows: the practical endorsement does not apply at AS, although AQA notes that its AS papers are written expecting the six required practical activities, and that 15% of AS marks relate to practical work. An AS entry avoids the endorsement problem entirely, at the cost of being a smaller qualification.

Pearson Publishes Conditions, Not Exclusions

This is the section worth reading twice, because it is the answer to “my board says no”. Pearson Edexcel's guidance to centres opens with a sentence AQA does not have an equivalent for: “If you're a UK Edexcel approved centre, there is no restriction on entry in any subject for private candidates for any qualification you are approved to offer.”

Pearson then publishes a subjects-with-conditions list, which is a different document doing a different job. Counting the entries, 20 A Level and 11 AS Level specification codes appear on it — and they are, almost exactly, the subjects missing from AQA's availability table. Art, Craft and Design (9AD0), Fine Art (9FA0), Graphic Communication (9GC0), Photography (9PY0), 3D Design (9TD0), Textile Design (9TE0), Drama and Theatre (9DR0), Product Design (9DT0), Music (9MU0), Music Technology (9MT0) and Physical Education (9PE0) all sit on Pearson's conditions list rather than on any exclusion list. So do Biology (9BI0), Chemistry (9CH0), Physics (9PH0), Geography (9GE0), History (9HI0) and the three English specifications.

The condition is real, and Pearson states the consequence plainly: “These conditions must be met by a centre in order to make an entry for a private candidate. If the conditions cannot be met, the centre should not make any entry for a private candidate.” The difference from AQA is not that Pearson is easier. It is that Pearson locates the decision at the centre and says so, which tells you where to direct your effort.

Language speaking components are handled the same way. Pearson names 14 GCSE and 6 A Level specifications with a speaking component and requires that the centre “must ensure that the appropriate qualified person conducts the oral component”. Arabic, Greek, Gujarati, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Turkish and Urdu appear on the GCSE list — a wider range than AQA's, which is itself a reason to check both boards before concluding a language is unavailable.

The GCSE Picture, and Why AQA's Table Is Out of Date

At GCSE the arithmetic runs differently. AQA's private-candidate table names 32 GCSE specifications; its current qualifications listing carries 47. Computer Science (8525) appears on the GCSE availability table but has no counterpart on the A-level one, which is a real board-level difference rather than a rounding error.

The staleness of the table shows most clearly in modern languages. The private-candidate page names GCSE French (8658), German (8668) and Spanish (8698). AQA's current qualifications listing carries those three and GCSE French (8652), German (8662) and Spanish (8692). A private candidate preparing for the newer specification will not find its code on the availability page at all. That is not a statement that the newer specification is closed to private candidates; it is a page that has not been rewritten.

The science conditions at GCSE are stricter in one respect than at A-level. Where the A-level condition covers the separately reported practical endorsement, the GCSE Biology row requires that “The entering centre must make provision for private candidates to carry out all the practical activities specified in section 8 of the specification” — the full set of required practicals, not an endorsement sign-off.

Timing narrows the GCSE picture further. AQA's confirmed timetables page lists a “November 2026 exam timetable - GCSE and Level 3 Extended Project”, and no November A-level equivalent. A GCSE resit therefore has an autumn route that an A-level resit does not; the dates and what carries over are set out in our guide to resitting A-levels in November, which also covers the carry-forward mechanics in full and is not repeated here.

Finding a Centre That Will Assess the Practical

Board permission is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. The binding constraint is one centre's willingness, and the numbers are not encouraging. JCQ publishes a search tool and states that “There are a total of 190 centres who have confirmed that they will accept private candidates”, adding that “Centres in this list are updated once a year, in December/January”. That figure was read on 16 August 2026; because the list is refreshed on an annual cycle, check the tool rather than this page for the current count. That is the population willing to take a private candidate for anything. It is not the population that will run a laboratory session, supervise four days of fieldwork or find a native-speaker examiner.

AQA is unusually direct about how the filtering works in practice: “In most cases they will only accept you if they're entering their own students for the subject(s) you want to enter for.” Read that alongside AQA's requirement that centres “must only accept entries from a private candidate if they are willing” to provide the NEA or practical endorsement, and OCR's near-identical line that “Your host centre can only accept your entry if they are willing to provide you with the opportunity to complete the internal assessment.” The practical effect is that your search is not for a centre with a spare desk. It is for a centre that is already teaching your specification in the series you want to sit.

What the centre actually has to do

One detail materially reduces the ask, and almost no guide mentions it. For a specific set of components, AQA marks the work itself rather than requiring the centre to mark it. Counting the list AQA publishes, 22 components fall into this category: the Component 3 speaking tests for AS and A-level French, German and Spanish; A-level and AS Dance Component 1 performance and choreography; A-level and AS Music performance and composition; and the Component 2 speaking tests for GCSE French, German, Spanish, Bengali, Chinese (spoken Mandarin), Italian, Modern Hebrew, Panjabi, Polish and Urdu.

For those components the centre supervises and administers but does not assess. That is a smaller commitment than marking a coursework folder to a specification the staff do not teach, and it is worth putting to an exams officer who has said no on the assumption that marking was involved.

One centre network's published position

Centre policies vary and none of them generalise, so treat the following as one worked example rather than a rule. Tutors & Exams, which runs 8 centres in England, publishes a list of what it will and will not assess. It does host A Level science practical endorsements, A Level Geography fieldwork, Environmental Science field trips, modern foreign language speaking tests and NEA coursework, and states that it offers “over 50 subjects at A/AS Level via 120+ distinct specifications”.

Its position on GCSE science is the interesting one. It advises private candidates seeking a science GCSE to “look at the IGCSE option as it does not require access to a laboratory to complete ‘practicals’ assessment as required by GCSE specifications”. That is one provider's commercial judgement, not a regulatory position, and an International GCSE is a different qualification from a GCSE — a distinction that matters if a sixth form, employer or funding rule specifies GCSE. But it names the real obstacle precisely: laboratory access, not board permission. If you are weighing what a resit route will cost you overall, our breakdown of GCSE and A-level resit costs sets out the fees a centre adds on top of the board's entry fee.

How to Test a “No” Before You Accept It

Almost everything on this page is an absence claim, and absence claims are the easiest thing to get wrong. Four checks, in order.

Check the code, not the subject. Ask which specification code the centre or board is refusing. AQA's answer for A-level English Literature A (7712) is not its answer for AS English Literature A (7711), which carries no condition at all. Six Art and Design endorsements share a subject name and six different codes.

Ask the other boards. A subject absent from AQA's table may sit on Pearson's conditions list, and OCR's published position is that all its subjects are available with suitability judged specification by specification. A refusal from one board is not a refusal from the system.

Ask whether a carry-forward removes the condition. If the barrier is the science practical endorsement and you already hold one, AQA allows a private candidate re-taking A-level Biology, Chemistry, Geology or Physics to “request to carry forward a previous grade for the practical skills endorsement, even if it was awarded by a different exam board”. A centre that cannot run a laboratory can still enter a candidate whose endorsement is already banked. This is the single most common reason a “no” turns into a “yes”, and it is worth raising in the first phone call rather than the fifth.

Ask what the centre is actually declining. There is one further AQA rule that trips people who are still on roll somewhere: “You cannot be entered as both an internal and private candidate at the same school/college, and in the same exam series.” A refusal from your own former school may be that rule rather than a subject judgement. Our guide to finding an exam centre as a private candidate covers the search itself, and if you need extra time or other arrangements, read it alongside our page on access arrangements for private candidates, since those are also decided by the centre rather than the board.

Where a board publishes nothing on your subject, say so and act accordingly. WJEC, Eduqas and OCR publish general conditions and no per-subject table. That is not a hidden prohibition. It means the answer exists only at the centre, and the only way to get it is to ask a centre. If your route runs through a board that sits outside the Ofqual-regulated four, our guide to the Cambridge International autumn resit series covers how that alternative calendar works.

Frequently Asked Questions