Preparing for the summer 2025 exam series
Kerry Davies, Head of General Qualifications Monitoring and Standards outlines our approach to setting standards and important reminders for schools and colleges as they prepare for the summer exams.
Learners in Wales will soon be sitting exams as part of the summer 2025 exam series – with the first GCSE exams taking place on 7 May. We know this is a period when centres are busy helping learners to finish their courses and encouraging them to put in much-needed revision time.
At a time when exams and assessments can dominate the school and college calendar, we wanted to give you an early outline of our approach to standards this year, the support available to centres, and the resources that can help learners as they prepare for the weeks ahead.
Summer 2025 approach to awarding, and outcomes
This summer, the quality of work (the level of knowledge, skills and understanding) that awarding committees will be looking for at each grade will be the same quality, or standard, as it was for equivalent grades before the pandemic. This learner performance should reflect the attainment standards required at that grade.
WJEC’s awarding committees will use a balance of subject expert judgement of learner scripts, along with other qualitative and statistical information, to set the grade boundaries for each exam paper and assessment. Find out more about how grades are decided.
While there may be assumptions that grade boundaries remain the same year on year, they are in fact set for each series, because it is very difficult for the awarding body to set an exam paper with exactly the same level of demand as the previous year’s paper. While there will be relative stability, given that papers are intended to have the same level of demand, we expect to see some small changes. For this reason, grade boundaries are set on the basis of how learners perform in each specific exam paper within each series.
Our approach to setting standards can be referred to as attainment referencing because it uses a combination of evidence sources, including expert judgement on the levels of attainment seen in a sample of learners’ work, and statistical information. You can learn more about this in a report that we recently commissioned from the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment.
It has been important for the Welsh qualifications system to return to established arrangements, to protect the currency and portability of qualifications taken by learners post-pandemic. We have spent a lot of time reflecting on the approach that we have taken in recent years, through what has been a transitional period of alternative assessment arrangements.
Setting grade boundaries at the required attainment standard this summer could see grade boundaries increasing in some subjects - compared to where they have been in recent years. If performance continues to show recovery, then outcomes should be broadly similar to pre-pandemic outcomes in most subjects.
An improvement in performance could see outcomes in some subjects, and at some grades, rise above 2019 levels. However, if learner performance is below the required attainment standards, then outcomes in some subjects and at some grades could fall below pre-pandemic levels.
Ensuring that the series runs smoothly
Since the pandemic, we are even more conscious of the potential for events to lead to substantial disruption to the exams and assessment season.
It is important for centres to have contingency plans in place so that they are prepared for anything that could cause disruption. Having a plan that sets out what would happen in the event of a local incident – such as a power outage or flooding - means that learners should still be able to sit their exams, even if they have to move to another venue. See our guidance on contingency plans for ensuring that exams run smoothly. for ensuring that exams run smoothly.
Our guidance also reminds centres of the need to prepare evidence of learner attainment. In the unlikely event that a decision is made to cancel the entire series, this will support sector resilience, by making sure that learners could be provided with centre determined grades on the basis of attainment evidence, if needed.
Supporting learners
With the first exams fast approaching, we’d like to remind centres of the revision guides and wellbeing support available to all learners, whether they are taking general or vocational qualifications. These can all be accessed through the Power Up site on Hwb, which is a collaboration between ourselves, Welsh Government and other partners. There’s also lots of information in our 2025 Learner Guide.