October 2025 Psychology subject update

We are continuing to add to our free teaching resources for A Level Psychology teachers, with a new 'Maths in Psychology' worksheet on correlation and cause, and a new pack in our 'Supplementary Topic Support' series. These are based on articles from the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog, with the latest looking at psychopathy and offending.

View all Teaching and Learning Materials for A Level Psychology

MiP Worksheet: Correlation and Cause 342.7 KB pdf /content/dam/pdf/A Level/Psychology/2015/teaching-and-learning-materials/mip-worksheets-correlation-and-cause.pdf false 2025-10-03T13:58:21.761Z Supplementary Topic Support: Criminological Psychology - Offending Psychopaths 326.1 KB pdf /content/dam/pdf/A Level/Psychology/2015/teaching-and-learning-materials/supplementary-topic-support-offending-psychopaths.pdf false 2025-10-03T13:57:30.701Z

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The BPS Teacher Toolkit is a great selection of free resources for psychology teachers, ready to download and use in the classroom. The latest to be uploaded offer guidance to teachers on adolescence and toxic online content, and teaching ideas for schema theory and the use of storytelling in teaching about Milgram's research.

The BPS Research Digest is a great recommendation for students who want to deepen their understanding of psychological issues and research practices, with short and accessible summaries of current research.

• View free resources in the BPS Teacher Toolkit
• Visit the BPS Research Digest blog

These free activities are a great way to make psychology teaching feel 'current' and relevant, and can help students develop the key exam skill of applying their knowledge of theories and research evidence to novel real-world situations and issues.

• View Psychology in the News teaching activities from Tutor2U

Our IAL psychology specification has been updated for first assessment in the upcoming January 2026 series. The changes are limited to the teaching of the psychodynamic approach for unit 2, one 8 mark question on unit 3 which can now assess any of the issues and debates, and minor changes in wording to clarify that synoptic questions can be answered with material from any topic. Read about these changes in my November 2024 update. The course textbooks published a year ago are current and were written with this update in mind.

Our UK A Level specification has been updated to show the increase in the time allowed for paper 1 and paper 2 - now 2 hours and 15 minutes. There are no changes to the content of the specification.

There has been no change to our GCSE psychology specification.

For International A Level psychology the units can be taken in any exam series (they are available in January as well as the May/June series each year), and can also be spread over a longer time period than two years if needed.

There is no time limit other than the 'lifetime of the qualification' (at some point the current course will be replaced by a new one but no date has been set for this yet, and exams for the current course will be available for a number of years). This means that students can resit units the year after they finish their course if they want to improve their grades.

The units can be split over four different exam series, or can be taken all together in one series. They can be taken in any order, but the IA2 units (units 3 and 4) have synoptic questions which require knowledge of the IAS units (units 1 and 2).

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.

• Convert raw marks to UMS marks here

Yes, our qualification page has one edited by Ali Abbas listed along with the Pearson textbook on its resources page. Here's a link to the second edition:

Psychology GCSE for Edexcel: Revise and Supplement