GCSE Spanish 2026: AQA, Edexcel or WJEC in Wales?

GCSE Spanish in England is set by AQA (entry code 8692) and Pearson Edexcel (1SP1). OCR offers no GCSE Spanish at all, and neither does Eduqas, the England-facing WJEC brand. A separate WJEC specification exists for Wales, regulated by Qualifications Wales rather than Ofqual, on a reform timeline a year behind England's.

Both AQA and Edexcel reformed their specifications for first teaching in September 2024, with first exams in June 2026. That reform is also why an old bookmark or search result can still show a retired code -- AQA's 8698 or Edexcel's 1SP0 -- as if it were current. It is not, and this page says so plainly.

Which Exam Boards Actually Offer GCSE Spanish?

AQA's own subject hub confirms it directly: "GCSE Spanish First teaching: September 2024 Next exam: 09 June", under entry code 8692. Pearson Edexcel's specification names its own qualification as the "Pearson Edexcel Level 1/Level 2 GCSE (9–1) in Spanish (1SP1)", also first teaching September 2024 and first certification from 2026. AQA and Pearson Edexcel are the boards offering GCSE Spanish in England; OCR and Eduqas, covered next, are not.

OCR does not. Its own complete Languages subject list enumerates every language qualification it offers at every level, and the list contains nothing for French, German or Spanish -- Classical Greek and Latin only, at GCSE, AS, A-level and Entry Level. Eduqas, the England-facing WJEC brand regulated by Ofqual, does not offer it either: its own full GCSE list runs from "GCSE A Geography" to "GCSE Sociology" with Latin as its only classical or modern language. A widely used revision site lists "Eduqas WJEC" as offering GCSE Spanish "in England" and links to a specific qualification URL; fetching that exact URL directly shows it redirects to Eduqas's generic qualifications list, not a Spanish page -- corroborating, from a live example, that the qualification it names does not exist.

WJEC itself is a different matter, and a different brand from Eduqas despite the shared name. WJEC's own qualification page, titled "GCSE Spanish | Made for Wales", confirms a GCSE Spanish reformed for "Teaching: Sept 2025" under reference code 3840QS, stating plainly that "The GCSE Spanish qualification will support the Curriculum for Wales". That is a year later than AQA's and Edexcel's September 2024 reform in England, and it sits under Qualifications Wales rather than Ofqual -- a genuinely separate qualification, not a Wales-branded copy of the England specifications.

Is 8692 or 8698 the Current AQA Code -- and Which Edexcel Code Is Live?

AQA's own 8698 specification page now carries a notification banner rather than acting as if nothing changed: "GCSE Spanish 8698. This is the legacy specification. Please visit GCSE Spanish 8692 for the current specification (first teach Sept 2024)." That is AQA's own words, read directly from the 8698 page, and it is the cleanest confirmation that 8692 -- not 8698 -- is what a school teaches now.

Edexcel's history is easy to get backwards for the same reason. Pearson's own June 2025 grade-statistics document reports Spanish results under code 1SP0; its June 2026 grade-statistics document reports Spanish under 1SP1. Both are genuine Pearson publications, a year apart, either side of the same September 2024 reform AQA made -- so 1SP0 is not a typo or a rival board's code, it is simply the June 2025 Edexcel Spanish code, and 1SP1 is the June 2026 one.

AQA's own specification PDF carries a further detail worth publishing rather than quietly picking one figure and moving on: its title page reads "Version 1.3 September 2025", while AQA's own landing page labels the identical download "GCSE Spanish Specification for first teaching in 2024 v1.1", dated 16 September 2025. Both descriptions come from AQA itself, on the same page, for the same file. This page uses Version 1.3 -- the document's own self-declared version, printed on its own title page -- for every AQA specification figure quoted here.

Foundation or Higher -- Does the Choice Work the Same Way on Both Boards?

Yes. AQA's specification states it directly: "GCSE Spanish has a Foundation tier (grades 1–5) and a Higher tier (grades 4–9). Students must take all four question papers at the same tier. All question papers must be taken in the same series." Edexcel's specification sets the identical structure -- "Each paper is available at Foundation or Higher tier. Students must be entered for a single tier across all papers" -- across its own three written papers and one speaking assessment. Neither board lets a student mix tiers across papers, and both apply the same Ofqual-set grade ranges.

That shared floor is not a coincidence between the two boards. AQA's specification is explicit that "Assessment objectives (AOs) are set by Ofqual and are the same across all GCSE Spanish specifications and all exam boards" -- so tiering, grade ranges and what is actually assessed sit outside either board's discretion. What each board can and does set differently is paper timing, task order and its own vocabulary list, covered below.

How Are the Four Skills Examined, and Where Do AQA and Edexcel Genuinely Differ?

AQA's Listening paper runs "35 minutes (Foundation tier), 45 minutes (Higher tier) • 40 marks (Foundation tier), 50 marks (Higher tier) • 25% of GCSE", including a dictation section. Edexcel's Listening paper is longer at Higher tier -- "Foundation tier: 45 minutes, including 5 minutes' reading time, 50 marks Higher tier: 60 minutes, including 5 minutes' reading time, 50 marks" -- and its own dictation section is marked against sound-symbol correspondences set out in Edexcel's Appendix 2: Grammar, a different appendix structure from AQA's.

Speaking is where the two boards diverge most visibly, even though both weight it at 25% of the qualification and both have it conducted by the student's own teacher and marked externally. AQA's specification confirms "the test is conducted and audio-recorded by the teacher and marked by an AQA examiner", with tasks running Role-play, then a reading-aloud task and short conversation, then a photo-card discussion. Edexcel's Paper 1 runs "Internally conducted and externally assessed: Foundation tier: 7-9 minutes plus 15 minutes' preparation time; 50 marks... 25% of the qualification", with its own task order: Task 1 Read aloud, Task 2 Role play, Task 3 Picture task with conversation. The tasks are broadly equivalent in substance, but the order a student rehearses them in is genuinely different between the two boards.

The Vocabulary List and Sound-Symbol Correspondences Each Board Sets

Both boards are built on the same DfE subject-content floor for vocabulary size, and both publish their own distinct list on top of it. AQA's specification states: "Students are expected to know 1,200 lexical items for Foundation tier, and a further 500 lexical items for Higher tier", 1,700 in total at Higher, plus 30 short phrases and 20 cultural or geographical items, with some of that vocabulary drawn from "the DfE subject content Annex E". Edexcel's specification sets an almost identical size -- "1200 words to be used at both Foundation and Higher tier and an additional 500 words to be used at Higher tier only", plus 20 more cultural or geographical words and 30 short phrases -- but adds a constraint AQA's specification does not state: "At least 85% of the vocabulary, at each tier, is expected to be taken from the top 2000 most frequent words according to the corpus published by Routledge." A vocabulary list built for one board's 85%-frequency rule is not automatically the right list for the other board's exam.

Sound-symbol correspondences -- the specific Spanish spelling-to-sound patterns tested in the Listening dictation and the Speaking reading-aloud task -- get the same treatment: both boards examine them, and both publish their own version. AQA sets these out in a dedicated Appendix 1, describing it as covering "key differences in sound spelling correspondences between Spanish and English which students will need to learn at GCSE to be able to read out loud and transcribe with sufficient accuracy". Edexcel folds its own equivalent list into a different appendix, Appendix 2: Grammar, rather than a standalone SSC appendix -- the same underlying skill, examined and published in two different places.

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Did GCSE Spanish Grades Really Rise in 2026 -- and Does It Depend on the Board?

Ofqual's own results-day summary is unambiguous about the general picture: "Overall outcomes in French, German and Spanish are slightly higher in all 3 subjects than in 2025. This is the first year of awards based on the new GCSE courses introduced in 2024. Ofqual committed to making sure that students would be neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by being the first to take these." Ofqual's February 2026 guide for schools makes the same first-award point from the other direction, warning that "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."

Look at the two boards' own published results separately, though, and the picture is not one uniform rise. AQA's results moved from 27.2% of candidates achieving grade 7 or above in June 2025 (under the outgoing 8698 specification) to 29.7% in June 2026 (under the reformed 8692) -- a rise of 2.5 percentage points, calculated here from AQA's own two results-statistics documents, since AQA does not itself publish that year-on-year change. Over the same period, AQA's own entries fell from 102,687 to 75,073, a fall of 26.9%.

Edexcel's own results moved barely at all: 28.5% of candidates at grade 7 or above in June 2025 (code 1SP0), against 28.2% in June 2026 (code 1SP1) -- again, our own calculation from Edexcel's two published documents, since Pearson does not itself state the change. Edexcel's entries moved the opposite way from AQA's, more than doubling from 26,797 to 57,387, a rise of 114.2%.

Put plainly: AQA's entries fell sharply while its top-grade rate rose; Edexcel's entries more than doubled while its top-grade rate held essentially flat. A shift of that size in which board's entry a candidate sits under is consistent with schools or candidates moving between boards -- it does not, on its own, establish that grading became easier or harder on either board, and neither AQA nor Edexcel publishes a reason for the change. Spanish itself was not part of any 2019 grading adjustment: Ofqual's own decision that year required French and German to be aligned "to align grading standards in French and German with Spanish", explicitly because "the evidence is less strong in GCSE Spanish which does not appear, statistically, to be severely graded and entries are not declining". Spanish was the fixed benchmark, not a subject that was itself moved. That French-and-German story, including their own board-by-board 2026 boundaries, is covered in full on our separate GCSE French and German grading blog post and is not restated here.

Every figure on this page comes from AQA's, Pearson Edexcel's, OCR's, Eduqas's or WJEC's own published specifications and results documents, or from Ofqual's own decisions and guidance, checked directly rather than taken from a secondary summary. Primary sources: AQA's GCSE Spanish (8692) specification, AQA's legacy GCSE Spanish (8698) page, Pearson Edexcel's GCSE Spanish (1SP1) specification, OCR's Languages subject list, Eduqas's full GCSE list, WJEC's GCSE Spanish qualification page, AQA's June 2025 GCSE results statistics, AQA's June 2026 GCSE results statistics, Pearson Edexcel's grade-statistics page (2025 and 2026 GCSE documents), Ofqual's 2019 inter-subject comparability decision, Ofqual's 2026 results-day blog, and Ofqual's February 2026 guide for schools and colleges. This page also draws on our own London GCSE Spanish tutoring page and Manchester GCSE Spanish tutoring page for city-level detail, and sits under our wider GCSE tuition hub. Checked 8 September 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions About GCSE Spanish