August 2023 History Subject Update

Results Day Support

On behalf of the Pearson Edexcel History team, we want to thank everyone in schools and colleges for your dedication in supporting students and helping to make sure they achieve the grades they deserve. This update contains key information and guidance for the Summer 2023 results period for GCSE, International GCSE and A level History, including key dates, details of post-results services and grade boundaries.

Summer 2023 Grade boundaries

You can access Summer 2023 grade boundaries on our website from results day. In addition to the official grade boundaries that are produced at subject level, we also provide notional grade boundaries at paper level. These can help you mark and assess future mocks.

For 2023, the approach all exam boards have taken to awarding was to return to pre-pandemic grading, while giving students protection against any impact of disruption. Results in summer 2023 therefore are far more in line with summer exams that were sat in 2019, but lower than in 2022, when grades awarded were based on a mid-point between 2019 and 2021 outcomes. This is explained in our ‘Understanding grade boundaries in 2023’ document below:

Edexcel GCSE History Paper 1 Medicine in Britain and Paper 3 Germany: Pre-results update

This summer we received feedback from teachers concerning the issues identified on these papers and now all the scripts have been marked we are providing a final pre-results update to centres explaining how the question papers performed and outlining next steps.

Student surveys for GCSE and A level History

Thank you for sharing our recent student surveys with your students - we received some fantastic feedback about their experiences of studying our qualifications and sitting exams this summer. These surveys are still open and we are keen to get more feedback so if you see students over the results period please do encourage them to complete our survey to help give us valuable insight into our qualifications and assessments.

Edexcel Online and Multi-Factor Authentication

This update provides information about Edexcel Online and Multi-Factor Authentication to ensure teachers are able to access the documents and systems they require over the summer results period.