What is the Unit Award Scheme?

The Scheme can be used across all age groups.
The AQA Unit Award Scheme is a way of recognising the achievement of students, not only in traditional areas of the curriculum but also in areas such as enrichment activities, personal development and personal and social health education.
The Scheme can be used across the full ability range.
The Unit Award Scheme is used by approximately 1000 centres throughout the United Kingdom (schools, colleges, special education establishments, pupil referral units, hospital education services etc) to recognise student achievement across a wide range of subject areas and activities.
The AQA Unit Award Scheme provides the opportunity to give students formal recognition of their success in short units of work.
The Scheme promotes effective teaching and learning by ensuring that those writing and delivering units give careful consideration to learning outcomes, evidence and assessment and by setting down clear targets for students.

The Scheme is based on a unit or modular approach with courses of study (or key areas of a course) being presented to students as a series of individual units of work. Each unit is a valid educational study in itself and can be linked to other units, either in the same subject area or across the curriculum or in extra-curricular areas.
As students successfully complete a unit, their achievement is recognised through the issuing of a Unit Award Statement, which details the outcomes demonstrated by the student in successfully completing the unit. This recognition of success has been shown to motivate students and improve their performance. Each student also receives a summary Letter of Credit which lists, by title, all the units completed.
The Unit Award Scheme is a record of achievement and, as such, is not a qualification. However, where units of the Unit Award Scheme have been specifically approved by QCA as part of a qualification (as in the case of AQA unit-based Entry Level Certificate specifications) the Unit Award Scheme may be used in the delivery of those qualifications.

AQA is committed to the expansion of the Unit Award Scheme and wishes to promote new uses of the Scheme in response to the needs of centres and students. Areas of development include use of the Scheme in Education Action Zones, by commercial organisations, by prisons and young offenders' institutions and by special schools (to assist in recording achievement in terms of P-scales), and the promotion of unit-based accreditation of achievement in work-related learning and citizenship.