May 2025 Psychology subject update
Welcome to your Pearson Edexcel Psychology May 2025 subject update.
Hello colleagues,
This update contains key dates clarifying when exam materials will be published over the coming exam series and news of upcoming free training and CPD opportunities in June and July.
We are also very pleased to share the first batch of a new series of free resources for A Level teachers which make use of the BPS Research Digest's excellent summaries of recent research.
As ever, please don't hesitate to get in touch if I can help in any way.
Best wishes,
Tim Lawrence
Psychology Subject Advisor
If you have any questions, then please do contact me:
☎ Call: 0344 463 2535
✉ Email: teachingpsychology@pearson.com
💻 Book a Teams meeting with me: https://bit.ly/4bBZjpB
This update includes:
- Key dates: including release of exam papers, mark schemes and examiner reports, and 2026 exam timetables.
- Curriculum and Assessment Review: publication of the interim report on qualification reform.
- Training and professional development: free training events for GCSE and A Level psychology and the ATP conference - all in June and July.
- New free resources for A Level teachers: based on BPS Research Digest articles with exam questions, exemplar responses and commentaries.
- Frequently Asked Questions: raised by psychology teachers recently.
| 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) |
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.
The UK Government's interim report on qualification reform was published in March with the final report due in the autumn.
Many teachers have been emailing me asking about the future of our GCSE and A level qualifications. We have no changes to specifications in the pipeline currently (an amended IAL psychology specification was announced in 2024 and will come into effect for January 2026 exams).
These monthly updates will keep you informed of any future announcements about reform of our psychology specifications.
We have two free, live online training events coming up in June and July:
Maths/Statistics for A Level Psychology - 17 June 2025 at 16:00-17:30 BST
GCSE Psychology for Non-Specialist Teachers - 03 July 2025 at 16:00-17:30 BST
See the link below for more details of these events and to book onto them, and to view pre-recorded training including 'new to Edexcel' training for GCSE and A Level psychology and marking training for GCSE teachers.
Another great event coming up in the summer is the Association for the Teaching of Psychology (ATP) conference at the University of Warwick on the 11th-12th July, where I am hoping to deliver a workshop. I hope to see some of you there! Bookings close on the 1st July - see link below for more information.
We have recently published the first set of a new series of free classroom resources designed for A Level psychology teachers, although many of them will be equally useful for IAL teachers, including the first three which are available at the time of writing.
We have selected articles from the British Psychological Society's excellent Research Digest blog, which summarises recent research in a style and format well suited to A Level students. These have been linked to A Level specification points, and example exam questions which the contents of the articles could be used to address are provided, along with exemplar answers with examiner commentaries.
The first three examples are for clinical psychology and can be downloaded directly below - more will follow shortly to 'worksheets and resources' on the 'teaching and learning materials' section of the qualification page - link to this also below.
While these have not been designed as revision resources, they may be of interest to students preparing for exams for exam question practice with unseen material - useful for practising AO2 skills.
One of the priorities for examiners when writing papers and setting grade boundaries is to ensure comparability between exam series - ensuring that each grade awarded reflects the same standard of work in different years. Because it can be difficult to predict how challenging candidates will find questions until an exam is sat, there will however always be some variation between exam series in the difficulty of the papers.
Grade boundaries are therefore set once 'all the marks are in', during the awarding process between the completion of marking and the sharing of results with candidates. Examiners take the spread of grades achieved by candidates in previous series as a starting point. They also make use of other data about the cohort of candidates sitting the exams in that year, and feedback from examiners on the standard of candidates' responses relative to previous years. This allows any variation in the strength of the cohorts to be taken into account.
This means that if a particular exam series is more challenging, the grade boundaries will be lower (and the reverse is also true). Unless there is a significant difference in the strength of the cohort relative to previous years, the percentage of students achieving each grade will be approximately constant.
For linear qualifications like the UK A Level and GCSE in psychology grade boundaries are set on the total raw mark.
For modular qualifications like IAL psychology where candidates take their exams over different exam series a system is needed to ensure that each unit contributes fairly to the overall grade despite small variations in the challenge of individual exam papers, and therefor variation in their grade boundaries - this is the Uniform Mark Scale or UMS.
UMS grade boundaries are fixed and are the same for all IAL qualifications: 80% for an A, 70% for a B, 60% for a C, 50% for a D and 40% for an E. An A* grade is awarede for an average of 90% of the UMS marks for the IAL units (units 3 and 4 for psychology), as long as the candidate has 80% (the A grade threshold) across all units (all four for psychology). Counterintuitively this means that for an A* grade 70% of the UMS from the IAS units (units 1 and 2 - a low B) are sufficient.
The raw mark grade boundaries are quite different to these and vary series by series. The raw mark on a given exam is converted to a UMS mark out of 80 (for units 1 and 3) or 120 (for units 2 and 4) using a conversion table which examiners set when they set the grade boundaries for each paper.
The web page linked below allows you to convert specific raw marks to UMS marks for a given past exam paper. The 'all scores' tab allows you to view how every raw mark on that paper was mapped onto a UMS mark.
Grade boundary documents show the maximum mark for A Level psychology as 270, whereas there are in fact 260 raw marks across the three papers.
For GCSE psychology a maximum mark of 180 is shown while the raw marks on the two papers add up to 177.
In each case a 'scaling factor' is applied to the raw mark on each paper, and the overall qualification grade boundaries shown are in terms of the 'scaled marks' that raw marks are converted to.. This makes the weighting of each paper equal to the proportion set out in the specification (35%, 35% and 30% for the three A Level papers, 55% and 45% for the two GCSE papers), which would otherwise be difficult to achieve with raw marks.
For teachers wishing to use past grade boundaries as a guide when assessing students, the scaled mark grade boundaries as percentages can be used since the scaling factors do not affect these. Alternatively the 'notional component grade boundaries' published for each exam paper in each series can be used for this purpose. For linear qualifications such as these grade boundaries are not set for individual components (papers) but these documents show where they would be if they were.
Subject advisor
Tim Lawrence
Psychology and international Science
