Why GCSE French and German Grades Rose in 2026

GCSE French and German grade-7-or-above results rose by 0.6 and 0.7 percentage points in 2026, smaller than the 1.8-point rise in Spanish — the largest movement of any GCSE subject that year. All three languages were sitting brand-new specifications for the first time, and Ofqual required exam boards to protect this first cohort from being disadvantaged. The bigger change was not in grading at all: entries collapsed at AQA while Edexcel’s nearly doubled.

This Is the First Year of the New GCSE Specifications — and Ofqual Promised No One Would Be Penalised

Reformed GCSE French, German and Spanish specifications have been taught since September 2024, and summer 2026 was the first series in which they were examined. Ofqual’s own results-day blog states plainly that outcomes in French, German and Spanish were “slightly higher in all 3 subjects than in 2025”, and that this “is the first year of awards based on the new GCSE courses introduced in 2024”, adding that Ofqual “committed to making sure that students would be neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by being the first to take these.”

That commitment is not a slogan. Ofqual’s February 2026 guide for schools and colleges spells out the mechanism: “When qualifications are reformed, we require exam boards to put in place measures that protect against students being unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged based on whether they sat the outgoing or incoming specifications. This will be the case for these new qualifications in summer 2026.” The same guide is explicit that this protection makes old and new boundaries incompatible: “It should not be assumed that grade boundaries on the new versions will be at the same mark, or set at the same proportion of the maximum mark, as previous versions.”

The specifications changed at the level of the paper, not just the syllabus description. AQA’s own subject code for GCSE French moved from 8658 to 8652 and German from 8668 to 8662; Edexcel’s French code moved from 1FR0 to 1FR1 and German from 1GN0 to 1GN1. A changed accreditation code is not cosmetic — both boards treat 2026’s French and German as different qualifications from 2025’s, which is exactly why a boundary mark from one cannot be read against the other. The general mechanics of how any GCSE grade boundary is set each year, separate from this reform, are covered in our grade boundaries explainer.

Why This Is Not the Same Grading Adjustment You May Remember From 2023 or 2024

Ofqual made a genuinely large, deliberate grading change to GCSE French and German before 2026, and it is easy to assume the same process simply continued. It did not. On 5 November 2019, Ofqual decided that French and German were “severely graded in comparison to other subjects” and required exam boards to “align grading standards in French and German with Spanish” — not the reverse. The change was phased: exam boards had to award more generously at grades 9, 7 and 4 in summer 2023, then a further positive adjustment followed in summer 2024, covering grades 9, 7 and 4 in German and grades 7 and 4 in French (French’s grade 9 was left alone, because Ofqual judged it already aligned with Spanish by 2023). Ofqual’s own July 2024 notice states that, following these two phases, there was “greater alignment between GCSE French, German and Spanish than prior to the pandemic.”

The Association for Language Learning (ALL), the subject association for language teachers, tracked the real size of that move on the old specification. According to ALL’s own year-by-year figures, French’s national grade 7-or-above rate rose from 26.0% in 2023 to 28.0% in 2024 and 29.7% in 2025, and German’s rose from 27.6% in 2023 to 32.1% in 2024 and 34.0% in 2025 — a 6.4 percentage-point move for German across the three years to 2025. That dwarfs the 0.6 and 0.7 percentage-point rise French and German saw in the single year to 2026: dividing 6.4 by 0.7 gives roughly nine, our own comparison rather than a published figure, and an approximate one, since percentage points earned across three adjustment years do not accumulate at a constant annual rate.

Nor was a further adjustment quietly extended into 2026. FFT Education Datalab’s chief statistician, Dave Thomson, said in May 2025 — several months before the new specifications were even examined — that “if ever there were a time to adjust grading standards it would be” the first-award year, but that “there does not appear to be any suggestion that this will happen.” None did. What changed in 2026 was the first-award protection described above, and, as the next section shows, who was sitting the exam.

Why Did the Pool of French and German Students Change in 2026?

National entry figures moved only modestly in 2026. JCQ’s results, reported by Schools Week, put GCSE French entries at 117,259, down 5.5% on 2025, while German rose slightly to 31,302 (up 0.3%) and Spanish to 127,236 (up 0.5%). Read on their own, those numbers suggest a stable, gently shrinking subject.

The board-level picture looks nothing like that. AQA’s own June 2025 and June 2026 Exam results statistics documents show AQA’s GCSE French entries falling from 97,806 to 68,706 — a 29.8% drop — and AQA German falling from 25,392 to 17,301, a 31.9% drop. AQA’s Spanish entries fell too, from 102,687 to 75,073 (26.9%), so this was not confined to French and German. Over the same two years, Pearson’s own Grade Statistics documents show the opposite happening at Edexcel: French entries rose from 27,265 to 52,159, up 91.3%, and German rose from 6,158 to 15,163, up 146.2%.

Combine the two boards and the picture is closer to the modest national change — AQA and Edexcel French together moved from 125,071 to 120,865 entries, a small net fall consistent with JCQ’s 5.5% figure once other boards are included. But a school using only AQA, comparing its own 2025 and 2026 results directly, would be looking at two meaningfully different cohorts: a smaller, more self-selected group of AQA French and German candidates in 2026, after tens of thousands of students effectively moved to Edexcel’s version of the same new specification. A shrinking, more self-selected cohort tends to show a higher attainment rate even with no change to how boundaries are set — one reason AQA’s own grade 7-or-above rate moved by more than the national figure, covered below.

The 2026 Grade Boundaries, Board by Board — and Why They Cannot Be Compared to Last Year

The table below gives AQA’s and Edexcel’s published 2026 Higher tier boundaries for French and German, for parents checking a specific mark. It shows 2026 only. Ofqual’s own guidance, quoted above, states directly that a boundary mark on the reformed specification “should not be assumed” to sit at the same mark, or the same proportion of the maximum mark, as the boundary on the outgoing specification — so no 2025 figure appears in this table, and none should be inferred from it.

Foundation tier, which caps at grade 5, moved on the same two boards: AQA’s grade 5 boundary sat at 146 of 200 for French and 149 of 200 for German, and Edexcel’s at 152 of 200 for both subjects. A ranking of every AQA GCSE subject side by side by raw-mark share, including where French and German’s 2026 grade 9 boundaries fall against the rest of the curriculum, sits in our full raw-mark ranking rather than being repeated here.

So Did French and German Actually Get Easier in 2026?

The honest answer is probably not by much, and not for the reason “grading got easier” implies. FFT Education Datalab, which has argued for years that French and German grading is unduly severe, said explicitly in its August 2026 results analysis that it knew “of no attempts to change grade boundaries” behind this year’s rise. That statement sits awkwardly next to the scale of the real 2019-2024 adjustment: German’s grade 7-or-above rate moved 6.4 percentage points across the three years to 2025, when Ofqual really did intervene, against 0.6 and 0.7 points for French and German in the single year to 2026, when, on FFT’s own account, nobody did.

Severity has not gone away either. Schools Week’s May 2025 report on FFT’s subject-severity analysis found French, alongside Spanish, still graded more harshly than German when measured against a pupil’s own English and maths average, and quoted FFT describing even Spanish — the subject Ofqual never adjusted — as “still graded too severely.” The Association for Language Learning has said much the same: it wants a “greater adjustment” so that language grades sit level with other EBacc subjects on average, not just closer than before.

What moved most in 2026, at least at AQA, was the shape of the cohort rather than the standard being applied to it. AQA’s own grade 7-or-above rate for German rose 3.0 percentage points in the single year from 2025 to 2026 (34.8% to 37.8%) — over four times the 0.7-point national figure FFT reported for the same year — which is closer to what a smaller, more self-selected AQA cohort would be expected to produce after roughly 8,000 fewer AQA German candidates were entered in 2026, many of them likely sitting Edexcel’s version of the same new specification instead, than to any change in how hard the exam itself was marked. If your child is starting GCSE French or German now, our GCSE tuition works from the specific board and tier they are actually entered for, not a national average.