Since the Secretary of State for Education announced that the 2020 exam series in England would be cancelled to help fight the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19), we have worked at speed to develop a process which fairly recognises students’ work and makes sure they get their grades in time to progress. You will find on this page details about how qualifications will be awarded this summer, further guidance for teachers, students, parents and carers and an open letter to students who were expecting to be taking their exams this summer.

Results data release – information provided by awarding organisations

In June 2020 Ofqual sought information from all awarding organisations about their method for providing results data to centres and in what format they could provide downloadable files that would reduce the need for time-consuming manual handling of the data.

This was in response to centres raising concerns about receiving a lot of data in a short period of time before results days which requires manual handling to get results out to learners.

A digest of awarding organisations’ responses is provided in Awarding organisation results information ( CSV , 7.53KB). We have not included information from those who indicated that the questions were not applicable to them.

Please note that since this information was gathered Ofqual has contacted awarding organisations to ask them to prioritise the release of results data for certificating learners on level 2 and level 3 qualifications that carry UCAS points or that are used for progression to further or higher education, and setting expectations for the timing and format of release of data. Some of the details set out in the table may have been superseded as a result.

Guidance for general qualifications

The attached guidance applying just to general qualifications is:

Guidance for Vocational Qualifications

The attached guidance applying just to Vocational Qualifications is:

Other guidance

Guidance for Heads of Centre, Heads of Department and teachers on objectivity in grading and ranking ( PDF , 196KB , 5 pages )

Summer Symposium

Calculating grades in GCSE, AS and A levels in summer 2020: a video for centres and stakeholders