July 2025 Psychology subject update
Welcome to your Pearson Edexcel Psychology July 2025 subject update.
Hello colleagues,
Congratulations to teachers who are completing an academic year of teaching, I hope you get some thorough rest and relaxation over the coming weeks!
This update contains an important announcement on additional time for A Level Psychology papers for the 2026 series onwards, as well as 'getting ready for results day' information, resource news for GCSE psychology and an examWizard update for IAL psychology amongst other news.
As ever please don't hesitate to get in touch via one of the methods below if I can help in any way.
Best wishes,
Tim Lawrence - Psychology Subject Advisor
This update includes:
- Key dates: including release of exam papers, mark schemes and examiner reports, September RoMM deadline and 2026 exam timetables.
- Additional time for A Level Psychology exams: from 2026 onwards for UK A Level papers 1 and 2.
- Getting ready for results days: a collection of links to useful pages to help teachers prepare to support students over the results period.
- Post exam-series survey: we want teachers' feedback on this summer's GCSE, A Level and IAL psychology exams.
- New free resource for GCSE teachers: a transition resource designed to support students to refresh key concepts from their Key Stage 3 studies relevant to GCSE psychology.
- Training and professional development: recording available for our Maths/Statistics in A Level Psychology training.
- ActiveLearn to ActiveHub upgrade: digital resources for psychology will soon be available on our new, improved platform.
| 24 June | Summer 2025 question paper release for Level 2 (GCSE) |
| 1 July | Summer 2025 question paper release for Level 3 (GCE and IAL) |
| 15 July | Summer 2025 mark schemes for Level 3 (GCE and IAL) |
| 22 July | Summer 2025 mark schemes for Level 2 (GCSE) |
| 14 August | A level and International A Level results to candidates |
| 19 August | Summer 2025 examiner reports for Level 3 (GCE and IAL) |
| 21 August | GCSE results to candidates |
| 26 August | Summer 2025 examiner reports for Level 2 (GCSE) |
| 25 September | Deadline for Review of Marking and Moderation |
Final exam timetables for the summer 2026 exam series have now been published on our website along with those for International A Level exams in January 2026.
We’ve listened carefully to feedback from A Level Psychology teachers and students. While we are not making any changes to the specification or the structure of the exams at this time, we are pleased to confirm an important update to the timing of Papers 1 and 2.
Following Ofqual approval, we’re happy to announce that from the June 2026 exam series onwards, the time allowed for both Paper 1 and Paper 2 will increase to 2 hours and 15 minutes. Paper 3 will remain at 2 hours, as it carries fewer marks (80 rather than 90).
All other aspects of the papers will remain unchanged. This means you can continue to use existing past papers for mocks and practice, simply adjusting the time allowed for Papers 1 and 2.
We hope this change will help reduce exam-day pressure and give students more opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding.
You can access Summer 2025 grade boundaries on our website from results day. In addition to the official grade boundaries that are produced at subject level, we will also be providing notional grade boundaries at paper level. These can help you mark and assess future mocks.
ResultsPlus is our free online results analysis tool, that gives you a detailed breakdown of your students’ performance in Pearson Edexcel exams.
It provides you with the most detailed analysis available of your students’ performance. ResultsPlus will help you to identify topics and skills where your students could benefit from further learning – helping them gain a deeper understanding of their subject.
Teachers can sign into ResultsPlus using their Edexcel Online username and password if their account profile has ResultsPlus access granted by the Exams Officer.
Examiner Reports can be obtained from ResultsPlus on results day by following the steps below:
- Log into Results Plus using your Edexcel Online detailsOnce you are logged in under your centre, select 'ResultsPlus Analysis'.
- Then select 'Whole cohort results' followed by 'Cohort paper analysis'.
- Select the relevant qualification and series, eg 'GCE' and 'June 2025', followed by the relevant subject and 'View paper analysis'.
- Select 'Exam docs' and you will find the Examiner Report for that component
You can also use our free Access to Scripts service to view your candidates’ marked exam scripts online or download as a PDF. It is available from results day until the 12 December 2025.
Providing a rich source of information, you can use this service to help make decisions about requesting a review of marking, but it can also help inform future teaching and learning and gives insights and visibility that performance data alone cannot provide.
If scripts have been marked ‘traditionally’ (ie not online), you will need to request them, free of charge, by 12 December 2025, via the Post Results section of Edexcel Online as in previous exam series.
Note, you will need 'Exam viewer' in your Edexcel Online profile if you want to download candidate scripts from results day. Please ask your Exams Officer if you need this adding to your profile.Discover more about Access to Scripts, along with FAQs and a step-by-step User Guide.
Please note, candidate consent is required before requesting script copies, as per section 4.2 of the JCQ's Post-results services guide. Candidate consent can only be obtained after results have been published.
See how teachers have been using Access to Scripts
"An excellent service, we have used it to inform our teaching"
Take a look at the Access to Scripts case studies to see how a number of schools and colleges have been using this service to evaluate how their students performed in the exams, identify skills gaps, help tailor future teaching plans and to develop staff CPD.
If you're not happy with your students' results from the Summer exam series, you can take the following steps:
- View the grade boundaries, question papers, mark schemes and examiner reports for the paper/qualification concerned. View your students’ scripts using our free access to scripts service that is available from results day until the 12 December 2025.
- Log in to ResultsPlus to see how your students have performed on every question for the externally assessed component and compare their performance to the national average.
- If you are still unhappy with your students' results, you may apply for a review of marking via our post-results services. Full details of all our post-results services are available on our website.
Please speak to your Exams Officer if you wish to proceed with a review of marking or moderation. Exams officers should contact their Centre Account Specialist on 0344 463 2535 if they require guidance or watch our post results video. All applications for reviews of marking or moderation must be submitted through Edexcel Online.
If you are dissatisfied with the outcome of a review of marking or moderation, you may wish to appeal against the decision. We will allow the head of centre (or designated member of the centre’s senior management team or examinations manager) 30 calendar days from the receipt of the outcome of the review of marking or moderation, during which an appeal may be lodged by filling in the form below. All appeals must be submitted by the entering centre.
We cannot accept appeals directly from candidates, their parents or other third parties acting on their behalf. The only exception to this is if private candidates are appealing directly without the support of the entering centre. There is further guidance on appeals on our website.
We have a dedicated web page for student post-results support. Please forward this link to your students where they can find information on the services for students.
Thank you to those of you who have already given feedback on this year's exam papers. If you are a teacher whose students have taken any of our exams in the May/June 2025 series and you haven't yet completed the survey(s), we are eager to gather your thoughts.
Your feedback will play a vital role in shaping the future of our qualifications and assessments. Your input will be shared with our senior examiners and across our subject teams to help us continuously improve future assessments and enhance the exam experience for students. We really appreciate your participation in this process, thank you. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey.
For students taking GCSE psychology this will be a new subject, however they will have developed many of the skills they will need through their previous studies in other subject areas, as well as acquiring some relevant knowledge that they may need help to recall!
In particular the Key Stage 3 (commonly referred to as 'lower secondary' internationally) courses in science, maths and English will have prepared students for their GCSE psychology course. Few psychology teachers will have taught all three of these, so we have looked at the UK National Curriculum and produced a transition resource which make links between our GCSE psychology specification and KS3 English, maths and science topics.
Available under 'resource list' on our 'teaching and learning materials' page, and via the link below, the transition support document has a checklist for students to audit their understanding of relevant topics at the start of their GCSE psychology course. It also features links to pages on the BBC's free Bitesize revision site, which they can be directed to in order to refresh their understanding of key concepts.
As we announced recently IAL psychology has recently been added to our free examWizard past paper search and 'build a paper' tool (GCSE and UK A Level teachers have had access to past paper questions for these courses since their launch).
The process of uploading papers and coding individual questions is a lengthy one, but we now have papers from 2022-2025 uploaded and increasing numbers of questions coded and therefore searchable through the 'build a paper' tool.
The recording of our free Maths/Statistics for A Level Psychology training (delivered in June) is now available to view on YouTube - see below.
Autumn training events including our Exam Insights events will be launched shortly and you will then be able to find details and book onto them using the link below.
As mentioned in our previous update, UK based teachers with subscriptions to Pearson digital psychology resources are currently being transitioned from ActiveLearn to ActiveHub.
International teachers of our courses will get ActiveHub access in March 2026 and will continue to use ActiveLearn until then.
With ActiveHub, you’ll get:
- a user-friendly interface with improved navigation·
- enhanced functionality including an insights dashboard, auto-marked activities and an assessment library*·
- a mobile-friendly platform, allowing your students to complete homework and interactive activities on the go
*Dependent on subscription package. For more details, including information about what’s in each subscription, visit our website.
Subject advisor
Tim Lawrence
Psychology and international Science
