A-Level Latin: The 2027-2029 Set Texts, One Board Only

A-level Latin is a two-year Level 3 qualification examined entirely by four written papers, and unlike most subjects on this site, the cross-board question has a single answer. Ofqual's Register of Regulated Qualifications shows Cambridge OCR's Advanced GCE in Latin (H443) as 'Available to learners', while AQA's own equivalent was withdrawn, with a final certification date of 31 August 2007. JCQ recorded 859 UK entries for the subject in the 2026 series.

Which Exam Boards Actually Offer A-Level Latin?

We checked this three ways: directly against Ofqual's Register of Regulated Qualifications for every board that might plausibly offer the subject; against each board's own current, live subject list or qualifications menu; and, because OCR's own qualification pages cannot always be trusted at face value, against a control test of OCR's site itself. All three checks agree, and all were carried out on 8 September 2026.

Ofqual's register entry for OCR's Advanced GCE in Latin lists it under qualification number 601/8254/4, with the status 'Available to learners', a regulation start date of 22 December 2015 and an operational start date of 1 September 2016. The companion standalone AS, H043 (QAN 601/8384/6), is also listed as 'Available to learners', though with an important difference covered below.

AQA's own register entry tells a different story: 'AQA Advanced GCE in Latin ... Qualification number 100/0117/7 ... Status No longer awarded ... Operational end date 31 August 2006. Final certification date 31 August 2007.' AQA is not absent from Latin the way Pearson and Eduqas are — it once offered a full A-level and later withdrew it, a genuinely different fact covered in its own right below. Cross-checked against AQA's own live A-Z subjects list, the list runs 'L Languages Law M Mathematics Media Studies' — no Latin entry at any level today, consistent with a historical withdrawal rather than a website gap.

Pearson Edexcel has never offered a UK A-level in Latin at all. Its own A-level Languages subject list, filtered to the 14 language A-levels it currently offers, runs from Greek (in three separate editions) and German through to Spanish, with no Latin entry among them; a DOM-wide search of that page for the substring 'latin' returns zero matches. No Pearson or Edexcel Latin qualification, current or withdrawn, appears anywhere in Ofqual's register.

WJEC Eduqas — the Ofqual-regulated brand WJEC operates for schools in England — offers Latin only below A-level. Its own qualifications menu lists 'Level 1 Latin' and 'GCSE Latin', but no 'AS/A Level Latin' entry, against the same menu structure that does list 'AS/A Level French' and 'AS/A Level German' explicitly. The absence is a genuine gap in Eduqas's own subject range, not a missing menu category.

The control test on OCR itself: a genuine OCR Latin URL and a deliberately invented one of the identical path shape were both fetched with a full browser user agent. The real page (62,269 bytes) is titled 'AS and A Level - Latin - H043, H443' and names Latin repeatedly; the invented page (48,185 bytes, still a full HTML document rather than an error page) renders the generic title and H1 'Qualification details', with zero occurrences of the invented string anywhere in its body text. A resolving OCR URL alone is never proof a qualification exists — the title, the body text and the Ofqual register are.

What Does OCR's Only A-Level in Latin (H443) Actually Require?

OCR's accredited specification (version 2.0, June 2026, first assessed in 2018) sets out four compulsory written components summing to 300 marks with no coursework: Unseen Translation (100 marks, 1 hour 45 minutes, 33% of the total), Prose Composition or Comprehension (50 marks, 1 hour 15 minutes, 17%), Prose Literature (75 marks, 2 hours, 25%) and Verse Literature (75 marks, 2 hours, 25%).

All four components are sat in the same examination series, at the end of the two-year course; the specification states plainly: 'All examined components must be taken in the same examination series at the end of the course.' There is a single series each year, in May and June. A student can retake the whole qualification as many times as they wish, but must retake every component together — the specification does not allow individual papers to be resat in isolation.

How Does the Language Testing Differ From the Literature Papers?

Component 01, Unseen Translation, tests pure language skill against two fixed, named authors: OCR's specification states directly that 'the unseen prose passage will be taken from Livy and the unseen verse passage will be taken from Ovid.' No set text preparation helps here — the passages are genuinely unseen, but always drawn from the same two writers series after series.

Component 02 is a real either/or choice, not a fixed format. The specification requires students to 'either translate unseen material from English into Latin or demonstrate their understanding of a passage of unseen prose text through comprehension, translation and questions on syntax and accidence.' A school (or a student, depending on how the course is taught) effectively chooses between active composition and closer analytical comprehension.

Components 03 and 04 shift entirely to prescribed content. For each, students 'study one prose set text from those listed in Group 1 and one prose set text from those listed in Group 2 for the relevant examination series' (and the equivalent for verse groups 3 and 4 in Component 04), then sit an exam requiring translation of the set-text passages plus a literary-analysis essay drawing on wider reading in translation. This is the opposite skill from Component 01: known texts, prepared in depth, tested for critical understanding rather than sight translation.

What Are the Current Prescribed Set Texts — and Where Do OCR's Own Pages Disagree?

For examination in 2027, 2028 and 2029 — OCR calls this its fifth set-text cycle — the prose set texts are Cicero's pro Roscio Amerino (Group 1), plus a choice from Group 2 of Nepos' Life of Hannibal, Tacitus' Annals Book XIV or Apuleius' Metamorphoses Book VI. The verse set texts are Virgil's Aeneid Book 4 (Group 3), plus a choice from Group 4 of Tibullus, Lucretius or Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 7.

OCR has already published the next cycle, for examination in 2030, 2031 and 2032: prose set texts move to Cicero's In Catilinam 1 (Group 1), with Livy Book 2, Tacitus' Agricola or Petronius' Satyricon for Group 2; verse moves to Virgil's Aeneid Books 7 and 12, or Propertius. A family with a child starting Year 12 in September 2028 can already see which texts their course will use, two full cycles ahead.

Here is a genuine discrepancy this page will not resolve for you. OCR's own specification-at-a-glance page states plainly: 'The set texts rotate every two years.' OCR's own accredited specification PDF says the opposite: 'Each prose set text will be examined for a maximum of three years', and lists explicit three-year cycles — 2027-2029, then 2030-2032. The accredited PDF is the regulated document and is what this page has used throughout, but the two pages genuinely contradict each other on OCR's own site. If the exact rotation length matters for planning your child's revision timeline, confirm the current cycle directly with their school rather than relying on either OCR page alone.

What Does Ofqual Require of Every Ancient-Languages Specification — and Does OCR's Meet It?

The assessment-objective weighting behind H443 is not OCR's own choice. Ofqual's GCE Subject Level Guidance for Ancient Languages (reference Ofqual/17/6188, most recently revised 30 March 2017) applies identically to Biblical Hebrew, Classical Greek and Latin. It requires, at A-level: 'AO1 Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the language. 50% ... AO2 Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of literature. 20-25% ... AO3 Critically analyse, evaluate and respond to literature. 25-30%.'

OCR's own specification shows its delivered weighting sitting inside that band on every measure, not merely close to it: 150 of the qualification's 300 marks (50%) are AO1, all of them from the Unseen Translation and Composition/Comprehension components; 70 marks (23.3%) are AO2; and 80 marks (26.7%) are AO3, split across the two literature papers. Every figure lands within Ofqual's mandated range.

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Is the AS Level Being Phased Out While the Full A-Level Continues?

This is worth stating in one sentence precisely because it is easy to conflate the two qualifications. Ofqual's register lists OCR's standalone AS Level in Latin (H043, QAN 601/8384/6) with an operational end date and final certification date both of 31 August 2028, while the full A-level (H443, QAN 601/8254/4) carries no operational-end or final-certification date at all as of 8 September 2026. The AS and the A-level are separate qualifications with separate codes and separate Ofqual records, and only the standalone AS has an announced wind-down date; nothing in the register suggests the full two-year A-level is being withdrawn.

How Many Students Take A-Level Latin, and How Does It Compare With Similar Small-Entry Subjects?

JCQ's 2026 results, covering the UK and all ages, recorded 859 A-level Latin entries, against 987 in the 2025 series. Ranked by entries against every other subject in the same table, Latin placed 40th of the 51 subjects JCQ tracks, sitting between Geology (957 entries) and Health & Social Care Double Award (856). Total UK A-level entries across all subjects were 906,425 in 2026.

65.4% of 2026 UK, all-ages entries achieved A*-A, a small rise from 65.0% in 2025. The gender split was 58.0% female (498 entries) to 42.0% male (361 entries) — a far less skewed balance than some other humanities A-levels carry.

Two other subjects sit under the same Ofqual ancient-languages guidance covered above: Classical Greek recorded 168 UK entries in 2026, and Biblical Hebrew recorded 73. Latin's 859 entries make it, by a wide margin, the largest of the three subjects this regulatory framework governs.

Getting Support for A-Level Latin

Latin does not currently appear among the subjects named on our own A-level tuition hub's list of tutored subjects, and this page does not invent a Latin-specific product it cannot deliver on. What we do offer is A-level tuition built around whichever specification a student's own school has entered them for — in Latin's case, that specification can only be OCR's H443, since no other board offers it, so a tutor can start from the actual paper structure, unseen-author pairing and set-text cycle described above rather than a generic classics course.

Families weighing up Latin against other options their sixth form offers may also find our A-level Sociology and A-level Psychology pages useful — both carry their own board-availability quirks (Pearson Edexcel offers neither), though neither is withdrawn the way AQA's Latin specification was. For the full range of subjects we cover at this level, see our A-level tuition hub.

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