If you are home educating or you are learning a language in addition to your school subjects, you need to read this. Things will run more smoothly if you can read it before you start studying the language, but there is usually a way to work things out later in your learning journey.
Booking an Exam Centre
You will need to find an exam centre where you can sit the exams, including the oral paper. This may be private offices where exam rooms have carpets and there are armchairs in the waiting room, or it maybe part of a school.
Schools tend to be cheaper, so it's worth phoning a few in your area first. If you have come out of school, you may not feel comfortable with the school setting, so be realistic about the whole exam process. Schools tend to offer a language exam with the same board as their students study, but they may also offer additional minority languages that are also available through that board.
Exam centres are usually smaller and quieter and some of them will have all the different boards on offer, covering both GCSE and IGCSE. They may, however, have other limits. If you need extra support or additional time, it may be harder to provide this, in their smaller premises. Some private exam centres have very few staff and will take a while to respond to calls or emails. If you have more subject specific questions about exam papers, they may not have teachers on hand to ask. It can be stressful, being responsible for your own child's exams, and small concerns can become major fears. A good rule is to double check information they give you if you are unsure. Find live home educators to ask, or go to the main home education exams discussion forums, where other parents will have made the same journey and there may be exam staff and tutors in the group too.
How much will it cost?
Unfortunately language exams are some of the most expensive to book. There will be three or four papers, including the Listening exam and an oral/speaking exam. The Listening needs a sound file that can only be sent and set up very close to the exam. The Speaking exam will need an examiner and the Cambridge IGCSE Speaking needs to be marked by the examiner as soon as the candidate has left. There are also strict rules about recordings and how to send secure files through the exam board, which all mean more work for the exam centre and costs that need to be covered.
Generally it won't be too much extra work for a school to add you to their list of candidates to sit the exam with the same board as their students, using their language teacher to do the oral. I've heard of schools who are still sometimes charging less than £100 for the whole thing, but this is unusual. At the other end of the scale, some of the private exam centres may charge over £300 for a GCSE/IGCSE language exam. If you have any kind of tutor or provider, you may find they can give you a code for a reduction at a particular exam centre. You don't necessarily have to be doing that particular subject with the provider, or still be using them. So don't be embarrassed to ask a provider if you are unsure.
So which exam board do I use?
Hopefully by now you will have worked out which language exams are available near you. If you live in a big town with a large commercial exam centre, you may find most or all of them are available. Hopefully this will feel liberating rather than overwhelming. You can enjoy learning the language and then finely tune your skills to a particular board, nearer exam season. It's worth checking regularly though as both schools and private centres sometimes change the boards they offer.
A number of schools will be switching board this Autumn in preparation for the new AQA and Edexcel GCSE exam format, as from June 2026. If you are sitting a GCSE in 2025, it will still be the current specification.
The specification changes are not too huge. There are slightly updated and rejigged themes, with some new tasks such as dictation included in the Listening paper and reading aloud in the Speaking. Still I think these changes are worth considering carefully. Sometimes there are teething problems in the first year of a new specification. Private centres and tutors may be less equipped to deal with these problems and they may cause more anxiety for an already nervous student. Then there is the problem of past papers. A new specification will have a sample paper, but usually nothing else provided by the exam board. In contrast the IGCSEs are not currently changing and have now been going several years, with two or three sittings each year for some languages. Think how many past papers are available to practise on for those.
I would suggest you look more closely at the exam specifications for each board, before making your final decision. You may want to particularly explore some of these points:
Are there many multiple choice questions? (Cambridge IGCSE Listening is currently entirely multiple choice)
Is the exam tiered with Foundation and Higher papers? (The IGCSEs aren't tiered, so no need for that agonising decision)
Do the papers gradually work through to harder questions? (AQA is the most obviously organised in this way to build up students' stamina)
What is the Speaking exam like? (Varies quite a lot now. Cambridge IGCSE is very scripted so you are a bit lost if you don't understand the question that can't be reworded. On the other hand the new AQA and Edexcel GCSE specs are meant to coax even the most nervous speakers to say something.
In the end, after you have thought of financial considerations and practicalities of different centres, if there is any time left for more thought processes, it boils down to how well you know your child and what kind of paper will work better for them. But don't fret too much. They are designed to all represent similar standards, so if one paper seems easier, there will be another part of the exam to balance this out.
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