When Do GCSE Mocks Happen? 2026-2027 Dates, School by School

GCSE mock exams have no fixed national date. Year 11 mocks are timetabled by each secondary school on its own, not by JCQ or the exam boards, so one school’s date says nothing about another’s. Checking seven English secondary schools’ own published 2026-2027 calendars directly finds five starting their first mock round in November 2026, one in December 2026, and one in January 2027 — a ten-week spread inside a single academic year, across just seven schools.

Why Isn’t There One Official GCSE Mock Exam Date?

The real GCSE exams have a fixed, published timetable: every exam board starts the summer 2027 series on Thursday 6 May and finishes on Monday 21 June, under regulations set by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), the umbrella body for AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas and WJEC. Mock exams sit outside that entire system. William Ellis School in Camden makes the distinction explicit on its own exams page: “Timetables for exams in November, January and Summer will be sent in hard copy as a statement of entry to your home address. The dates, times and information on it comes directly from exam boards.” The same page then sets a separate, stricter late-arrival rule specifically “for mock exams” — a rule the school wrote itself, because mock exams are not JCQ-regulated at all. Across the 51 schools whose calendars evidenced a dated round, most run a single set. Some schools call the same thing a PPE, or pre-public examination. What the resulting grade is then actually used for comes down to six specific decisions.

Even the one government document that touches mock timing does not set a date. The Department for Education’s Guidance on collecting evidence of student performance to ensure resilience in the qualifications system, updated 4 March 2025, exists so that schools have exam-condition evidence banked toward Teacher Assessed Grades if the real exams are ever cancelled — it names that purpose directly and is not written as advice on when mocks work best for revision. Even so, it leaves the actual scheduling to each school: “Centres should plan assessment opportunities to gather evidence of student performance in line with their usual assessment approaches.” No JCQ document and no DfE document names a mock exam date; that decision is left to each individual school, which is exactly why the seven schools below all chose different ones.

What Seven Schools’ Own 2026-2027 Calendars Actually Show

That seven-school pattern holds up against a much larger sample. A September 2026 check of 54 English secondary schools’ own 2026-27 calendars found 49 with a dated first Year 11 mock round: 37 of those 49 (75.5%) start in November, 6 (12.2%) in October, 4 (8.2%) in January and 2 (4.1%) in December. Thirteen of the 52 Year 11 schools in the same dataset (25.0%) already have dated mock activity before 1 November 2026 — Queen Elizabeth High School’s own calendar states that “the next set of year 11 mock exams will take place from Wednesday 14th October to Thursday 22nd October 2026”, three weeks ahead of the earliest November start in the seven-school sample below. The Department for Education’s own guidance on collecting assessment evidence gives the likely reason so many schools front-load the autumn term: it states that “schools and colleges are encouraged to complete assessments in the first half of the academic year where possible to create greater resilience in the face of unforeseen events.”

Seven of those 54 schools are detailed individually below, each checked directly at its own published calendar on 23 August 2026 rather than a summary written by someone else. Five of the seven — St Gregory’s Catholic College in Bath, Warden Park Secondary Academy in Haywards Heath, Holsworthy Community College in Devon, The Matthew Arnold School in Staines and Patcham High School in Brighton — start their first Year 11 mock round in November 2026. Yardleys School in Birmingham starts in December 2026, and Springwest Academy in Hounslow starts in January 2027. Own count, named: 5 of the 7 schools we checked start in November, 1 (Yardleys) in December, 1 (Springwest) in January — 5 + 1 + 1 = 7. The table below gives each school’s own first-round dates, as published on its own site and checked at the URL given.

Our own calculation on the spread: the earliest first-round start in the sample is Holsworthy, The Matthew Arnold School and Patcham High School’s 2 November 2026; the latest is Springwest Academy’s 11 January 2027. Counting the days between them — 28 remaining days of November, plus 31 of December, plus 11 of January — gives 70 days, exactly ten weeks, separating the first mock paper sat by the earliest school in our sample from the first mock paper sat by the latest.

Which Schools Run a Second Mock Round in Spring 2027?

Four of the seven schools we checked do not stop at one round. Warden Park Secondary Academy runs a second Year 11 mock window from 23 February to 4 March 2027, on top of its November round; its own exams page lists both dates together under “Mock Exams” for the 2026-2027 academic year. Holsworthy Community College runs a second round from 22 February to 5 March 2027. Yardleys School calls its second window a “Year 11 Core Mock Exams Week”, running 22 to 26 February 2027. Patcham High School runs the most exam windows of any school in the sample: a core round in November, a separate practical mock round for subjects such as art and design from 11 to 13 November 2026, an options-subjects mock week from 8 to 12 February 2027, and a second core round from 22 to 26 February 2027.

Observation, not a wider pattern: three of those four schools — Holsworthy, Yardleys and Patcham — each start their spring round on the same day, Monday 22 February 2027. Warden Park starts a day later, on 23 February 2027. That is worth noting across four schools; it is not evidence that spring mocks generally begin on 22 February, and the other three schools in the sample — St Gregory’s Catholic College, The Matthew Arnold School and Springwest Academy — run only one Year 11 mock round each, as far as their published calendars show.

At some schools a ‘second round’ is a cluster of separate dated events, not one exam week. Golborne High School’s 2026-27 calendar, checked at source on 10 September 2026, lists six in sequence: an Art & Photography mocks week (12–16 October 2026), a first written Year 11 Mocks Week split across two windows (19–23 October and 2–6 November 2026), a mock results ceremony (26 November 2026), a Year 11 MFL Speaking Mock Week (11–15 January 2027), a second written mock week (25–29 January and 1–5 February 2027), and a second results ceremony (4 March 2027). Patcham High School shows the same shape: a separate practical mock round for subjects such as art and design (11–13 November 2026), and a mock results collection (27 November 2026). A results ceremony is not the end of the story at either school: our guide on why mock grades drop in real exams explains why a grade collected in November or February often does not survive intact to the summer paper.

Do Year 10 Students Sit GCSE Mocks Too?

Yes, at most schools — and the school-by-school evidence points to summer far more often than autumn. A September 2026 check of 17 English secondary schools with a dated Year 10 mock round found 11 of them (64.7%) run it in June 2027. JFS in Brent publishes the clearest example: “Year 10 Mock examinations will take place from 21st June to 2nd July 2027 (subject to change).” The same June clustering appears at Greatfields, Patcham High School, Dover Grammar School for Girls and Beacon Academy. Sixteen of those 17 schools still call the event a ‘mock’ despite the summer timing; the one exception, Orleans Park School, labels the same June week ‘Year 10 Exams’ or a ‘Trial Exam’ instead.

The other six schools spread across January, March, April and May, plus St Martins in November, alongside Year 11’s own round. Warden Park Secondary Academy sits in that earlier-timed minority, with its own Year 10 window running 2 to 12 March 2027. Tutorful’s guide states Year 10 mocks “usually” fall in May or June — closer to the June majority than to Warden Park’s date, though a generalisation rather than a named count.

A 2026 Mumsnet thread asking parents when their child’s state school held Year 10 mocks drew replies describing summer-term exams, assessments “just before October half term”, and, at some schools, formal assessments as early as the end of Year 9. One parent summed up the position: “Proper mock GCSEs are only really when the majority of the content has been taught, and that won’t be till part way through year 11.” None of those schools were named or sourced, so this cannot count as evidence the way the 17-school dataset above can — but it is a reminder that even that sample will not capture every school’s own arrangement. Our separate guide on how to prepare for GCSE mocks covers what to do once your own child’s dates are confirmed, whichever year group they are in.

How Far Do Mock Exams Sit From the Real GCSEs in Summer 2027?

It depends entirely on which school and which round. The real GCSE exams run from Thursday 6 May to Monday 21 June 2027, the same fixed window for every exam board. Our own calculation, using that 6 May 2027 start date: Holsworthy, The Matthew Arnold School and Patcham High School’s 2 November 2026 mock start sits 185 days before the first real paper — 28 remaining days of November, plus 31 of December, plus 31 of January, plus 28 of February 2027 (not a leap year), plus 31 of March, plus 30 of April, plus 6 of May. Springwest Academy’s 11 January 2027 start sits 115 days before it — 20 remaining days of January, plus 28 of February, plus 31 of March, plus 30 of April, plus 6 of May. A 22 February 2027 second round, run by three of the four schools with a spring round, sits 73 days before the first real paper — 6 remaining days of February, plus 31 of March, plus 30 of April, plus 6 of May.

That is a genuine range: a school running only a November round gives its students roughly six months’ notice of exactly where they stand against exam-board grade boundaries; a school running a February round gives just over ten weeks. Neither is wrong — a longer gap allows more time to act on a poor mock result, while a later mock covers more of the taught content. Our guide to how GCSE grade boundaries are actually set is the place to check what a mock grade might mean once it arrives, since boundaries are set after the real exam series each summer and cannot be read directly off a mock paper.

How to Find Your Own Child’s Mock Exam Dates

Every date in this article came from one place: the named school’s own published calendar, key-dates page or exams page, checked directly on 23 August 2026 rather than taken from a summary or a forum post. That is the only reliable method, because — as the sections above show — no directory, exam board or government source lists mock dates by school. Most secondary schools publish theirs under a “Calendar”, “Key Dates” or “Examinations” page in the parents section of their website; several of the seven schools above list Year 11 mocks alongside Year 10 assessment weeks and parents’ evenings on the same page, so it is worth reading the surrounding entries rather than searching for “mock exam” alone.

If a school’s website does not yet show a mock date for the year ahead, that is not unusual this early in the year: Warden Park Secondary Academy’s own exams page, for instance, already lists both of its 2026-2027 mock windows while stating that its Summer 2027 real exam timetable “will be available in due course” — schools typically confirm mock dates well before the exam-board timetable for the real papers is published. A phone call or email to the school’s exams officer, the role named on most of the pages checked for this article, will usually confirm a date that has not yet been published online. Our specialist GCSE tuition support is built around the dates a family actually has, rather than an assumed national one.