We've increased the duration of our GCSE History (8145) Paper 1: Understanding the Modern World and Paper 2: Shaping the Nation exams from 1 hour 45 minutes to 2 hours to give students more reading and thinking time.

The change will affect the summer 2019 exams and all future series.

Students should spend about 1 hour on each section of Paper 1 and Paper 2. Our guidance on how much time students should write for each question type hasn't changed, nor have the requirements of any of the questions.

The updated GCSE History specification is now available. Version 1.5 of the GCSE May/June 2019 exam timetable has also been updated to reflect this change.