AQA's 8652 and Pearson Edexcel's 1FR1 — the reformed GCSE French specifications Reading's 2026 cohort actually sits — set against verified grade boundaries and school-by-school entry data.
Book a Free ConsultationGCSE French in Reading is now taught under two reformed specifications — AQA’s 8652 and Pearson Edexcel’s 1FR1 — both first taught from September 2024 and first examined in summer 2026, the qualification’s first award year. A 2026 grade boundary cannot be read against a 2025 one, because the accreditation codes themselves changed: this is the first sitting either specification has had.
Our expert GCSE French tutors work with students across Reading preparing for AQA’s 8652 or Edexcel’s 1FR1 specification, built around whichever paper structure and tier their own school has entered them for.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppEvery Reading pupil starting GCSE French from September 2024 is on a specification that did not exist for their older siblings. AQA renumbered its French GCSE from 8658 to 8652 for first teaching in 2024, and Pearson Edexcel renumbered its own from 1FR0 to 1FR1 on the same timetable — first teaching September 2024, first certification from 2026. Both boards treat the new code as a different qualification from the one it replaced, and neither has a prior year’s results to set this summer’s boundaries against. Because Ofqual treats each reformed code as a new qualification rather than a revision of the old one, the boards do not carry forward comparability statistics between 2025 and 2026 the way they would between two years of an unchanged specification — a mock result sat in 2026 can only be read against 2026’s own boundaries, never against a 2025 grade.
That reform sits on top of an older, separate story. On 5 November 2019, Ofqual decided to align French and German grading with Spanish’s — explicitly ‘but not Spanish’ itself — and required exam boards to put the adjustment in place from the 2020 exam series, phased in over more than one year rather than applied in a single sitting. That is not the same event as the 2026 specification change above, and it did not happen in summer 2025 as is sometimes assumed; the phased results themselves are covered in full in our guide to why GCSE French and German grades rose, which this page does not repeat.
As of 7 September 2026, AQA (8652) and Pearson Edexcel (1FR1) list GCSE French among their live specifications, verified directly against each board’s own page. OCR is a more complicated case: its live GCSE subject list, read in full on the same date, carries no French entry among its languages, yet a candidate qualification page addressed to a J720 code still returns a generic ‘Qualification details’ shell with no modern-languages content on it. A code can exist without a qualification being on a board’s current offer, and that is the honest position here rather than a simple yes-or-no.
AQA’s own specification sets French (8652) as a Foundation tier awarding grades 5 down to 1, and a Higher tier awarding grades 9 down to 4 — the same shape as the reformed Spanish and German GCSEs from the same 2024 reform wave. Pearson’s own June 2026 grade-boundaries document gives Edexcel French (1FR1) a 200-mark raw scale on both tiers. Its Foundation-tier boundaries run 152 for grade 5, 141 for grade 4, 100 for grade 3, 60 for grade 2 and 20 for grade 1, with the table’s bottom entry at 0 — a table our own coverage of the 2026 grading story has not previously published, because that piece carried only the Higher-tier figures for either board. Its Higher-tier boundaries, reading from the top of the same table, run 175 for grade 9, 161 for grade 8, 147 for grade 7, 133 for grade 6, 120 for grade 5 and 107 for grade 4, with a further, lower boundary at 100. Because AQA and Edexcel do not necessarily set the same raw mark against the same grade, a pupil preparing against one board’s paper structure and sitting the other’s exam would be checking their working against the wrong scale entirely — confirming which of the two specifications a school has actually entered a pupil for is not a formality.
Our expert GCSE French tutors help Reading students close the gap between a mock result and the actual boundary their board sets, whichever of AQA’s or Edexcel’s tiers their school has entered them for.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppPearson does not publish a grade-by-grade breakdown for French directly; its June 2026 provisional statistics for 1FR1 give only a cumulative series — the percentage of the 52,159 candidates at or above each grade, not the percentage sitting exactly on it. Read in full, that series runs: grade 9 or above, 8.5%; grade 8 or above, 18.1%; grade 7 or above, 29.7%; grade 6 or above, 41.7%; grade 5 or above, 60.7%; grade 4 or above, 73.9%; grade 3 or above, 93.1%; grade 2 or above, 97.4%; grade 1 or above, 98.2%; and the remainder to 100.0% unclassified.
| Grade | Cumulative % at or above (Edexcel 1FR1, June 2026) |
|---|---|
| 9 | 8.5% |
| 8 | 18.1% |
| 7 | 29.7% |
| 6 | 41.7% |
| 5 | 60.7% |
| 4 | 73.9% |
| 3 | 93.1% |
| 2 | 97.4% |
| 1 | 98.2% |
Source: Pearson Edexcel, provisional grade statistics, June 2026 award for GCSE French (1FR1). Each row is the percentage of the 52,159 candidates at or above that grade, not the percentage on it exactly — see the derivation below.
Turning a cumulative series into a per-grade share needs one subtraction: the percentage sitting exactly on a grade is that grade’s cumulative figure minus the cumulative figure one grade above it. Applied to grade 2, for example, 97.4% at grade 2-or-above minus 93.1% at grade 3-or-above leaves 4.3% of Edexcel’s French cohort landing exactly on grade 2 — a figure the published table does not state directly.
The same table also settles a comparison our earlier coverage of the 2026 results could not make, because it only had AQA’s own figures at the time. AQA’s June 2026 statistics record a 9.6% grade 9 rate for French. Grade 9 sits at the top of the scale, so Edexcel’s cumulative ‘grade 9 or above’ figure of 8.5% is already its grade 9 rate, with nothing above it to subtract. AQA therefore ran 1.1 percentage points ahead of Edexcel at the very top grade in French this June. The same gap reappears one grade band down: AQA recorded 30.8% of French entries at grade 7 or above, against Edexcel’s cumulative 29.7% at the same threshold — again a 1.1-point gap, in AQA’s favour both times.
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Hartland High School’s own 2024/25 subjects-entered record, published under its former name John Madejski Academy, lists 67 GCSE French entries and a single Italian entry — no Spanish, no German, and no other modern or community language anywhere else on the school’s full subjects list that year. For a pupil at this school, French is not one option among several: it is, in practical terms, the modern-language GCSE on offer.
The school itself changed identity partway through that period. John Madejski Academy closed on 31 December 2024, and Hartland High School opened the following day, 1 January 2025, as what the Department for Education’s own register records as a ‘Fresh Start’ successor establishment on the same site. Results for the 2024/25 cohort are still published under the old name, because the pupils who sat those exams did so before the change took effect. Checked against the Department’s own Get Information about Schools register on 7 September 2026, Hartland High School’s establishment status shows as Open.
Our expert GCSE French tutors help Reading students at both Foundation and Higher tier, across AQA and Pearson Edexcel, starting from wherever a school’s own mock results put a pupil against the boundary above.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppOther Reading schools spread the same subject differently. King’s Academy Prospect enters more pupils for French (74) than any other Reading state secondary in the raw 2024/25 count, though German (79) is narrowly larger again at the same school — so a King’s Academy Prospect pupil is more likely to be sitting French than not, but not certain to be. Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School shows a different pattern again: 54 GCSE French entries against a single Spanish entry, so French dominates there too, but for a different reason — not because no alternative exists, but because almost nobody takes the alternative that does. Both schools’ GIAS establishment records also show as Open, checked on the same date as Hartland’s. None of this changes which specification a pupil sits — that is set by the exam board, not the school — but it changes how isolated or how typical a family’s experience of GCSE French at their own school actually is. Support built for a Hartland pupil is built around the only language option that school offers; support built for a King’s Academy Prospect or Blessed Hugh Faringdon pupil is built around a genuine second choice the school itself teaches alongside French — a different starting conversation about motivation and alternatives, even though the underlying exam is identical either way.
For the wider French-versus-Spanish-versus-German entry picture across Reading’s schools, our guide to GCSE Spanish tutors in Reading covers the school-by-school language split in full — this page does not repeat it. Our broader GCSE tuition service covers AQA and Pearson Edexcel across every subject, and families managing more than one GCSE at once may also find our guide to GCSE maths tutors in Reading useful. Our tutoring across Reading page covers the borough broadly.
AQA and Pearson Edexcel both run reformed GCSE French specifications, first taught from September 2024. AQA renumbered its qualification from 8658 to 8652 for that reform, and Pearson Edexcel renumbered its own from 1FR0 to 1FR1 on the same timetable. Both boards treat the new code as a different qualification from its predecessor, with first certification from 2026 — so summer 2026 is the first award year for both specifications, and there is no earlier sitting of either one to compare a grade boundary against.
Pearson’s own June 2026 provisional grade-statistics document lists 52,159 candidates under ‘Total Sat’ for Edexcel’s French specification (1FR1) — a national total across every school entering pupils for the reformed qualification, not a Reading-specific count. Reading’s own most French-heavy state secondaries enter far smaller numbers each year: 67 at Hartland High School, 74 at King’s Academy Prospect and 54 at Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School, so the borough’s own French cohort sits well inside that national total rather than approaching any meaningful share of it.
As of 7 September 2026, AQA (8652) and Pearson Edexcel (1FR1) list GCSE French among their live specifications, verified directly against each board’s own page. OCR is more complicated: its live GCSE subject list, read in full on the same date, carries no French entry among its languages, yet a candidate qualification page addressed to a J720 code still returns a generic ‘Qualification details’ shell with no modern-languages content on it. A code can exist without a qualification being on a board’s current offer — that is the honest position here, not a simple yes-or-no.
Pearson’s own June 2026 grade-boundaries document sets Edexcel French (1FR1) Foundation tier on a 200-mark raw scale, with boundaries at 152 for grade 5, 141 for grade 4, 100 for grade 3, 60 for grade 2 and 20 for grade 1. This is the Foundation-tier table specifically — the Higher-tier boundaries for the same specification are higher and cover grades 9 down to 4.
AQA’s June 2026 statistics record a 9.6% grade 9 rate for French. Edexcel does not publish a grade-by-grade breakdown directly, but grade 9 sits at the top of its scale, so its cumulative ‘grade 9 or above’ figure of 8.5% is already the grade 9 rate, with nothing above it to subtract. That puts AQA 1.1 percentage points ahead of Edexcel at the top grade in French this June — a gap that reappears at grade 7 or above, where AQA recorded 30.8% against Edexcel’s cumulative 29.7%.
Yes. The 2024/25 results are published under John Madejski Academy, the name the school held for the whole of that academic year — John Madejski Academy closed on 31 December 2024, and Hartland High School opened the following day, 1 January 2025, as what GIAS records as a ‘Fresh Start’ successor establishment on the same site. The 67 GCSE French entries and single Italian entry recorded for that year belong to the cohort that sat exams before the rename took effect, not to a different school. Checked on GIAS on 7 September 2026, Hartland’s establishment status shows as Open.
No. King’s Academy Prospect enters more pupils for French (74) than any other Reading state secondary in the raw 2024/25 count, though German (79) is narrowly larger again at the same school. Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School shows a different pattern: 54 GCSE French entries against a single Spanish entry, so French dominates there too, but for a different reason. Both schools’ GIAS establishment records show as Open, checked on the same date as Hartland’s.
Yes. AQA’s specification (8652) sets a Foundation tier awarding grades 5 down to 1, and a Higher tier awarding grades 9 down to 4 — the same shape as the reformed Spanish and German GCSEs introduced in the same 2024 reform wave. A pupil’s own school, not this page, determines which tier and which board they are actually entered for, and the two boards do not always set the same tier boundaries for the same raw mark.
Book a free consultation — we’ll confirm whether your child sits AQA’s 8652 or Edexcel’s 1FR1 specification, which tier they’re entered for, and their current grade, before recommending a plan.
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