GCSE sciences criteria published

All awarding organisations wishing to offer GCSE science subject qualifications from September 2011 and thereafter will need to demonstrate to the regulators how their proposed specifications comply with these criteria. Any specifications that do not fully meet the criteria will not be accredited. Proposals need to be submitted to Ofqual by 21 April 2010 for accreditation on 11 August 2010.

One of the main purposes for developing new criteria at this time is to address actions from Ofqual's report, Findings from the monitoring of the new GCSE science specifications: 2007 to 2008 published in March 2009 and based on examinations offered by AQA, Edexcel and OCR (link to report already on the web). The changes to the criteria have addressed concerns expressed in the report about structural issues such as the significant variation found evident across the different specifications in the types of assessment used and the weightings allocated to them.

To ensure that other actions from the report are met, the regulators will closely scrutinise sample assessment materials submitted in the accreditation process to ensure that:

• they represent a valid assessment model for how science works, and
• individual assessments have sufficient scope to discriminate accurately across the full range of candidate performance.

The regulators also require the awarding organisations to ensure that new specifications attend to the views expressed by the science community about boosting the mathematical demands in new GCSE examinations in science subjects. To this end, QCDA has worked with members of the science education community to set out the mathematical knowledge, understanding and skills that candidates should be able to use in GCSE science subject courses. The regulators are planning to work with the science community over the next month to clarify the particular mathematical skills that are fundamental to each of the separate subject titles and to endorse the six documents that are produced. We will then work with the awarding organisations to achieve a shared understanding of the regulators' expectations of mathematical demands for the new specifications which will need to be fully realised in the assessments. When scrutinising sample assessment materials and, subsequently, live assessments, the regulators will therefore need to be satisfied that awarding organisations are requiring candidates to demonstrate a greater degree of mathematical knowledge, understanding and skills than is typically used in current GCSE sciences examinations.