Leicester’s first-award results for AQA’s reformed French GCSE (8652) and Pearson Edexcel’s 1FR1 — plus which of the city’s schools enter the most pupils for French, and which enter none at all.
Book a Free ConsultationGCSE French sat in Leicester from June 2026 is assessed against a genuinely new specification: AQA’s French 8652 and Pearson Edexcel’s French 1FR1 were both first taught from September 2024, so this summer’s grade boundaries have no earlier year to compare against. Rushey Mead Academy (280 GCSE French entries in 2025) and Castle Mead Academy (211) together account for 38.8% of the 1,264 French entries recorded across Leicester’s checked secondaries.
Already know your child’s GCSE French exam board? Our expert GCSE French tutors help students across Leicester build a revision plan around AQA’s or Edexcel’s actual Speaking-paper structure, not a generic one.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppAs of 7 September 2026, AQA and Pearson Edexcel both examine GCSE French, and both moved to a new specification for first teaching in September 2024, which makes summer 2026 the first year either has awarded a French GCSE against it. AQA’s current specification is French 8652, covering GCSE exams from June 2026 onwards — AQA’s own specification document is versioned 1.2, dated August 2026. It replaces AQA’s legacy French 8658, which was written for first teaching in 2016 and has now run its course. Pearson Edexcel’s equivalent is French 1FR1, confirmed on Pearson’s own qualification page as first teaching 2024 and first assessment 2026.
A new accreditation code is not a formality. AQA’s entry codes for the new specification are 8652F for Foundation tier and 8652H for Higher, filed under DfE discount code FKF and Ofqual qualification accreditation number 610/2790/X — a different QAN from the legacy 8658 specification it succeeds. Because Ofqual treats each specification as a distinct regulated qualification, a French grade awarded in summer 2026 has no directly comparable grade boundary from summer 2025: examiners are calibrating against new content and new assessment weightings for the first time, with no prior year’s cohort on the same paper to anchor the standard against.
Both boards split the GCSE evenly across four skills, but they structure the Speaking paper differently enough that a pupil moving between an AQA-entered school and an Edexcel-entered one would sit a genuinely different oral exam. On AQA’s French 8652, Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing are each worth 25% of the overall grade, and Foundation-tier Listening is the only component scaled up: 40 raw marks are multiplied by 1.25 to reach 50 scaled marks, bringing every tier and every paper to the same 200-scaled-mark total. Every other Foundation and Higher component is scaled at 1, according to AQA’s own specification.
AQA’s Speaking paper (Paper 2) is non-exam assessment rather than a conventional written exam: it is conducted and audio-recorded by the pupil’s own teacher, inside a five-week window timetabled for April and May, then sent away and marked by an AQA examiner rather than by the school. Pearson Edexcel’s Speaking paper (1FR1/1) is described in Pearson’s own specification as “internally conducted and externally assessed” — the same basic shape, teacher-run and board-marked — but the task structure is different, as the table below shows.
| Board | Task 1 | Task 2 | Task 3 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AQA (8652) | Role-play – 10 marks | Reading aloud + short conversation – 15 marks | Photo card discussion – 25 marks | 50 marks |
| Edexcel (1FR1) | Read aloud – 12 marks | Role play – 10 marks | Picture task + conversation – 12 + 16 marks | 50 marks |
AQA’s three tasks — a Role-play worth 10 marks, a Reading-aloud task plus short conversation worth 15 marks, and a Photo-card discussion worth 25 marks — total the same 50 marks as Edexcel’s four components, but the weighting inside that total is not the same shape. A student’s revision plan for the Speaking paper genuinely depends on which board their school has entered them for, not just which language.
Whichever board your child’s school has entered them for, our expert GCSE French tutors help students across Leicester rehearse the real Speaking-paper tasks — AQA’s three or Edexcel’s four — against the actual mark scheme.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppFullhurst Community College enters pupils for ten separate GCSE languages, more than any other Leicester secondary checked for this page, and French is the largest of them by a wide margin. The school’s own 2025 subjects-entered data, published on DfE’s Compare School and College Performance service, records French GCSE at 44 entries against Spanish at 20 — more than double — with Polish at 11, Italian at 3, and Arabic, Portuguese, Urdu, Gujarati, Modern Greek and Turkish each in single figures. No other Leicester secondary checked here teaches as many separate GCSE languages at once, and at Fullhurst, French is clearly the school’s default choice rather than one option among equals.
Checked directly rather than assumed, because DfE’s own data includes independent schools and an entry can just as easily be absent as present. Neither of Leicester’s two independent Muslim schools checked for this page enters any pupil for GCSE French, German or Spanish. Darul Uloom Leicester, with 13 pupils at the end of key stage 4 in 2025, enters 10 of them for GCSE Arabic and the rest across English Language, English Literature, History, Mathematics, Religious Studies, Science: Double Award and Social Science: Citizenship — its own subjects-entered table lists no French entry anywhere on the page. Jameah Boys Academy, with up to 19 pupils in the same cohort, shows the identical pattern: 9 entered for Arabic, the remainder across Business Studies, English Language, English Literature, History, Mathematics, Science: Double Award and Social Science: Citizenship, and again no French, German or Spanish entry recorded. At both schools, a modern European language simply is not part of the taught GCSE offer; Arabic carries the languages requirement instead.
Whether your child’s French class is one of Leicester’s largest or one of its smallest, our expert GCSE French tutors help students across Leicester build a programme from their own mock results and school, not a citywide average.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppTwo schools alone account for close to two in five of the French entries recorded across Leicester’s checked secondaries. Rushey Mead Academy entered 280 pupils for GCSE French in 2025 — nearly as many as its 318 entries each for English Language and Mathematics, its two largest subjects — and Castle Mead Academy entered 211, against 245 each for English Language and Mathematics. Added together, that is 280 + 211 = 491 pupils, against the 1,264 GCSE French entries this site’s own sibling Leicester GCSE Spanish page totalled across the 21 Leicester City secondaries it checked: 491 ÷ 1,264 = 38.8%. Whatever the citywide pattern looks like elsewhere, a French tutor working with a Rushey Mead or Castle Mead pupil is working with one of the city’s two largest cohorts, not a minority subject.
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No, and the two are easy to conflate. Ofqual’s real, large adjustment to French grading was decided on 5 November 2019, intended for the 2020 series and eventually phased into the summer 2023 and summer 2024 results on the old specification — years before French’s 2026 first-award year existed. Our own blog covers that earlier adjustment in full, including this exact question in its FAQ: see why GCSE French and German grades rose.
As of 7 September 2026, AQA and Pearson Edexcel both list a current GCSE French specification on their own sites — AQA’s French 8652 and Pearson Edexcel’s French 1FR1, both confirmed directly above. Beyond those two, the picture is more mixed than a simple yes-or-no. Eduqas’s own live, current qualifications list, checked on the date above, carries only “AS/A Level French” under its French heading; no GCSE French appears on that list. OCR’s own live GCSE qualifications list runs alphabetically with no French entry anywhere on it either — among languages, only Latin appears. Neither absence is the same as a board’s own statement that it has withdrawn a qualification, and this page makes no such claim for either board; it reports only what each board’s own current, live list shows on the date checked. A parent whose child’s school names a board other than AQA or Edexcel for French should confirm the specification code directly with the school rather than assume from this page alone.
Not sure which exam board your child’s school actually uses for French? Our expert GCSE French tutors help students across Leicester confirm it from the school directly before the first session.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppWhether a Leicester pupil sits AQA’s French 8652 at Rushey Mead Academy or Castle Mead Academy, or a smaller French cohort at a school like Fullhurst Community College, the starting point is the same: confirming which board, tier and paper structure actually apply before building a revision plan, since French’s 2026 boundaries have no prior year to benchmark against. Our diagnostic assessment for every new Leicester GCSE French student begins there, then works from a pupil’s own mock results and Speaking-paper confidence.
Our tutors hold degrees from leading UK universities and work one-to-one online through vocabulary building, grammar practice and full Speaking-paper rehearsal marked against the real task structure for a student’s own board — AQA’s three-task, 50-mark paper or Edexcel’s four-component equivalent — at whichever tier their school has entered them for. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades, and Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews.
For related subjects and levels, see our wider GCSE tuition across every subject, and our other Leicester subject pages for GCSE Spanish, GCSE Maths and GCSE Biology. For the full picture of tutoring across the city, see our overview of Leicester tutoring, or browse our full directory of UK tutoring locations.
Summer 2026 is the first award year for both current GCSE French specifications: AQA’s French 8652, for GCSE exams from June 2026 onwards, and Pearson Edexcel’s French 1FR1, confirmed on Pearson’s own qualification page as first teaching 2024 and first assessment 2026. AQA’s 8652 replaces its legacy French 8658, which was written for first teaching in 2016. AQA’s new specification carries entry codes 8652F (Foundation) and 8652H (Higher), DfE discount code FKF and Ofqual qualification accreditation number 610/2790/X — a different accreditation number from the specification it replaces, confirming these are treated as separate qualifications.
Because AQA’s French 8652 and Pearson Edexcel’s French 1FR1 were both first taught from September 2024 and examined for the first time in summer 2026, examiners have no earlier cohort sitting the same content and the same paper structure to set a grade boundary against. Ofqual regulates each specification as its own qualification, with its own accreditation number, so a 2025 French grade boundary belongs to a different, legacy specification and is not a like-for-like comparison for a 2026 result.
No. Both boards weight Speaking at 25% of the GCSE and both have the pupil’s own teacher conduct and record the test before it is sent away for board marking, but the task structure differs. AQA’s Speaking paper carries a Role-play worth 10 marks, a Reading aloud task plus short conversation worth 15 marks, and a Photo card discussion worth 25 marks. Pearson Edexcel’s carries a Read aloud task worth 12 marks, a Role play worth 10, and a Picture task worth 12 combined with a conversation worth 16 — both total 50 marks, split differently across four components rather than AQA’s three.
Fullhurst Community College, which enters pupils for ten separate GCSE languages according to its own 2025 subjects-entered data on DfE’s Compare School and College Performance service — more than any other Leicester secondary checked for this page. French is the largest of the ten, with 44 entries against 20 for Spanish, 11 for Polish and smaller numbers across Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, Urdu, Gujarati, Modern Greek and Turkish.
No. Darul Uloom Leicester, with 13 pupils at the end of key stage 4 in 2025, records Arabic as its only language entry (10 pupils) and no French, German or Spanish entry anywhere on its own subjects-entered table. Jameah Boys Academy, with up to 19 pupils in the same cohort, shows the same pattern: 9 entered for Arabic, none for French, German or Spanish. At both independent Muslim schools, Arabic carries the languages requirement instead of a modern European language.
Rushey Mead Academy and Castle Mead Academy, by a wide margin. Rushey Mead entered 280 pupils for GCSE French in 2025, close to its 318 entries each for English Language and Mathematics; Castle Mead entered 211, against 245 each for its two largest subjects. Together the two schools’ 491 French entries make up 38.8% of the 1,264 GCSE French entries this site’s sibling Leicester GCSE Spanish page totalled across the 21 Leicester City secondaries it checked — a figure derived here from each school’s own published entry count, not one DfE publishes as a single total.
No. Ofqual’s real grading adjustment to French was decided on 5 November 2019, intended for the 2020 exam series, and phased into the summer 2023 and summer 2024 results on the old specification — years before the reformed GCSE French examined for the first time in 2026 existed. The two events are unrelated beyond both concerning French grading; our blog post on why GCSE French and German grades rose covers the earlier adjustment, including this exact question, in full.
As of 7 September 2026, AQA (French 8652) and Pearson Edexcel (French 1FR1) both list a current GCSE French specification on their own sites. Eduqas’s own live, current qualifications list carries only “AS/A Level French” under its French heading, with no GCSE French listed; OCR’s own live GCSE qualifications list has no French entry anywhere on it either. Neither absence is the same as a board’s own statement of withdrawal, and this page makes no such claim — it reports only what each board’s current, live list showed on the date checked.
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