Choosing subjects & tiers
Which GCSE exam boards are there, and does yours matter?
England’s GCSEs are set by three main exam boards - AQA, Pearson Edexcel and OCR - plus Eduqas (the English arm of Wales’s WJEC). Northern Ireland has CCEA. Your school chooses a board separately for each subject, so you will usually sit a mix. The grades mean the same wherever they come from: Ofqual regulates all the boards so that no board is an easier route to any grade.
Last updated 23 August 2026 · Written and fact-checked by the GCSEwiz team
The boards, at a glance
Five awarding bodies set GCSEs across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. All are regulated (by Ofqual in England), all award the same qualification, and a certificate from any of them carries identical weight:
| Board | Who sits it |
|---|---|
| AQA | The largest board in England, strong across most subjects |
| Pearson Edexcel | England-wide; especially widely used for maths |
| OCR | England-wide; well known for sciences and computer science |
| WJEC / Eduqas | WJEC sets Wales’s own GCSEs; Eduqas is its brand for 9-1 GCSEs in England |
| CCEA | Northern Ireland’s board, where most subjects keep letter grades |
Your school chooses - subject by subject
Students do not pick a board; departments do, and each department picks its own. It is completely normal to sit AQA English, Edexcel maths and OCR sciences in the same summer. That is why "which board am I on?" has no single answer - you need to know it per subject.
Finding out is quick. Your teacher knows, and so does the school’s exams officer. The textbook or revision guide the class uses is usually branded with the board’s name, and any past paper your teacher hands out carries the board and a specification code (Edexcel GCSE maths is 1MA1, AQA is 8300) in the corner of the front page. In Year 11 you will also receive a statement of entry listing every subject with its board and code.
Is any board easier? The honest answer
No - and this is by design rather than by luck. Ofqual requires every board to align its grading standards, and grade boundaries are set after marking each summer so that a paper which ran harder gets lower boundaries. If one board’s maths paper is tougher this year, its boundaries come down to match. Students on every board earn the same grades for the same underlying standard, which is what makes the certificate trustworthy.
What genuinely differs is style and structure: the number and length of papers, the way questions are worded, which set texts an English course offers, how a history course is divided. Those differences can make one board feel friendlier to you, and that is a real consideration for private candidates who get to choose - but for everyone else, the board is simply a fact to know, not a worry to carry.
Why the board matters for revision
The board decides exactly which content is on your course and how it is asked, so revision materials matched to the wrong board quietly waste your time. Past papers from your own board and specification are the gold standard for practice. In English literature, the set texts differ by board, so someone else’s quote bank may cover a novel you never studied. In the sciences, the required practicals differ in their details. Ten seconds of checking the board name on any resource before you use it is one of the highest-value habits in revision.