Changes to Edexcel GCSE History for first assessment Summer 2025

Student surveys have raised this as an issue to address and a recent teacher survey had over 900 responses. Having reviewed this feedback, we have decided to add a small amount of time to each question paper. The new paper timings will apply to exams in Summer 2025 and beyond, and are shown in the table below:

The key features question appears first on both the Paper 1 Historic environment and Paper 2 British depth study. At present students are asked to provide two key features of an aspect of specification content for 4 marks.

Teacher feedback and performance data suggest these opening questions have not been consistently accessible to a wide range of students and this is something we are keen to address to improve the ‘ramping’ and accessibility of our papers.

For this reason, from 2025, instead of being asked to describe two features of one aspect of content, students will be asked to describe one feature each of two separate aspects of content. Students will have more opportunities to show their knowledge.

This change is shown in the table below:

We are aware that the Paper 2 assessment can be particularly daunting for some students, so we are also improving the ramping and accessibility of the Period study paper.

From 2025, instead of being asked to explain two consequences of an event or development, students will be asked to explain one consequence each of two separate events or developments. As with key features, students will have more opportunities to show their knowledge. 

This change is shown in the table below:

The change to the question structure of Paper 2B provided an opportunity to have more consistent question numbering on this paper, and this change is shown in the table below:

On Paper 3 many students feel they are required to learn and revise a lot of content that is not assessed, due to the skills-based enquiry focus of the assessment. To improve the overall balance of content assessed on this paper we are adding a choice to the ‘explain why’ question.

From 2025, students will now be given a choice of two ‘explain why’ questions to answer.

This change is shown in the table below:

Paper 1 judgement essays Q5/6 must currently cover at least 200 years, which means any question covering more recent events must start at or before c1800. This can sometimes make questions on the modern period more challenging compared to other periods.

From 2025 we will be requiring judgement essay questions in Paper 1 to cover either at least 200 years or a complete period: it will now therefore be possible to ask questions about the modern period only (1900–present). This change will enable examiners to set a broader range of accessible Paper 1 judgement questions.

The first three periods are all at least 200 years long, and so are unaffected by this change, which affects only the modern period. Questions on the modern period could, however, still include earlier periods depending on the focus of the question. Questions in general can still cross periods or cover two whole periods.

This change is shown in the table below:

As announced last year, we are also updating some of the language used in our specification for first assessment Summer 2025. These changes only affect certain terms which are now considered outdated and there are no changes to the specification content.

The most significant changes concern the terms ‘slaves’ and ‘Plains Indians’, which appear in Period study options P1, P2 and P3. The term Indigenous peoples will be glossed in brackets in live exam series from 2025, and an example from the Sample Assessment Materials can be seen via the link below. In any exam series, students are credited for any relevant and appropriate terms that they use.

This change was first announced in July 2023.

• Find out more about the specification language amendments for 2025

The changes to our assessment model from 2025 – coupled with the extended length of the current specification lifecycle – provide an opportunity to remind teachers of important elements of how questions are set.

Over the lifetime of the specification, our examiners aim to assess different parts of the specification content to ensure fair and even coverage.

However, we want to remind teachers that examiners can set questions across all of the content that is available each exam series. They do not set questions only on parts of the content that have not been assessed before. If examiners were to set questions only on material that had not previously been assessed, there would be an element of predictability about which topics might be covered in exam questions, a predictability that would only grow over time. This would undermine the fairness of assessments.

Questions in future exam series may therefore assess similar content. Depending on the question style, either similar or identical wording may be used. It is also possible that an individual source or interpretation may be used more than once over the lifetime of the specification.