Changes to 2021 exams for GCSE, AS and A-level Physical Education

Published: Friday 11 Sep 2020

We’ve been working hard to make the relevant changes to our qualifications following Ofqual’s decisions on summer 2021 exams, so here are the changes you need to know about.

GCSE (8582), AS (7581) and A-level (7582) Physical Education

  • For GCSE, students will be assessed in two activities rather than three. These can be two individual activities, two team activities or one of each
  • This year we’ll be moderating by post. There’ll be no moderation visits and work will be moderated using video evidence of students’ performance.

There are no planned changes to the written element of the NEA, the performance analysis assessment, at both GCSE and A-level. This is still a requirement of the specifications.

We understand that the ongoing public health restrictions will cause some very real challenges, and will be a barrier to both playing sports and collecting evidence. We know that social distancing measures may make certain activities difficult or even impossible for the time being. We also appreciate that students will have had little or no opportunity to play and acquire evidence of competition in their preferred sports over the last few months.

To support you, we’re creating guidance for schools and colleges on how to deal with these challenges. We’re keen to avoid extra work for schools and colleges and we want you to know now that it won’t be necessary to provide video evidence for every student. We’re still working out the detail of what evidence will be required, and we’ll publish full guidance on this as soon as we can.

We know that you’ll want to know more about the changes for next summer. We’ll be publishing further guidance about the summer 2021 exams over the coming months.

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