Exam Board





Ofqual (Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) is the UK examination monitor and one of its monitor member JCQ (Joint Council for Qualification) has a lot of awarding body working with them. In today's article, you will understand how different awarding body works, the different department under the "examination" category.


As a lot of you might be familiar with JCQ, a organisation which sets regulation and constantly check examination which happens all over the UK. At this moment (Nov 2025), there are a total of eight organisation working and under JCQ regulation, which are AQA, City and Guide, CEA, NCFE, OCR, Pearson, SQA and WJEC. A lot of awarding bodies such as AQA, OCR, Pearson (Edexcel) and WJEC offers General Certificate of Education qualification, also known as A-Level and BTEC qualification. This and the General Certificate of Secondary Education are courses which more than 60% of students will take for their preparation for their future studies such as for Universities application.


In the following parts, I will focus more on the five core qualification exam board, Pearson, CIE (Cambridge International Education), AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance), OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA) and last but not least WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee). Each of the awarding bodies have their own subsidiary of exam board, and their level of qualification differs.



In terms of Pearson, the largest awarding body across the UK has subsidiaries such as Pearson Edexcel, BTEC and PearsonVUE. Edexcel offers GCE, GCSE and O-Level qualification. If you do GCE you will be most familiar with Advanced Level, and International Advanced Level. The purpose of setting up A Levels and iAL qualification is to separate the UK qualification compared to worldwide, whist some school / exam center still does iAL as their qualification. This is because the GCE A-Level qualification only has exam session at the end of each academic year (May-June) whereas iAL offers examination every season (January, April, June, October) so it gives candidate more chance to enroll in their qualification. This system is also used in GCSE and iGCSE where some UK schools still does iGCSE qualifications.



Another exam board which offers iAL is CIE, this company is owned by UCLES (Cambridge Assessment International Education and Cambridge University Press & Assessment), where they also does large qualification such as IELTS test. There are less people who does iAL qualification with CIE compared to Edexcel as their examination style, syllabus are quite different for the equivalent course for other exam board.


AQA, another major exam board which a large proportion of candidate takes has a similar style with Edexcel. As both exam board are under JCQ which requires their equivalent qualification must include areas or topic which both exam board should cover. This makes the transition between exam board easier.

OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA) is based in Cambrdige but joint owned by the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts. AQA and OCR both are exam board which UK students will take for their A Level qualification.




WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee), Welsh: Cyd-bwyllgor Addysg Cymru is based in Wales. It has its subsidiary of Eduqas which offers examination for non Welsh school. Eduqas is a subsidiary of WJEC so a lot of course content are identical if the level of qualification are same. The only difference is Eduqas has a linear exam system, which is similar to iAL where they take all examinations at the end of second year A Level studies. Whereas, WJEC offers Advanced Subsidiary examination, students can take their qualification in the first year.



Examination paper style of different exam board differ from each other and the content of the course are different. For A level qualifications, I have listed out the content (unit examinations) and style of paper below, feel free to redirect yourself to the google docs below for further investigation.

Topic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tKlsY7oaH1bPk6YD-4u7tUDSOBNwfNsSXBsyzxs7lZo/edit?usp=sharing 

Style: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CQX-sEKGDa-KKoeIqHE3iK-CIxiF7P30PVUUFto0MSI/edit?usp=sharing


Hopefully after reading this article, you will know more about exam board. IGC HK Exam is a examination preparation center which I believe is useful and contains a lot of resources for WJEC students. They have created a specific area for WJEC students under IGC HK Exam -- WJEC. Go and check it out if you are interested!


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