Exam day, rules & kit
What is special consideration in GCSE and A-level exams?
Special consideration is a small post-exam adjustment to your mark, for candidates whose performance was affected by illness, injury or serious adverse circumstances - including a recent bereavement. Your school applies to the exam board with evidence; you cannot apply yourself. The adjustment is modest, but at a grade boundary it is real. It is not a re-mark, and the timelines are tight - so tell your exams officer the same week.
Last updated 29 July 2026 · Written and fact-checked by the GCSEwiz team
What it is, in plain English
Exams assume you arrive as a roughly normal version of yourself. When something serious means you didn't - you sat the paper with a fever, an injury, or in the shadow of a family bereavement - special consideration is the exam boards' way of acknowledging it. After marking, a small percentage adjustment is added to your mark for the affected paper, scaled to how serious the circumstances were under the boards' shared JCQ rules.
It covers two situations: you sat the exam but your performance was affected, or you missed it entirely for an acceptable reason (that second route can lead to a grade calculated from your completed papers). The common thread is that the circumstance was beyond your control, recent, and evidenced.
What qualifies - and what doesn’t
The classic qualifying circumstances: illness on the day or in the run-up, an injury that affected your writing or concentration, a panic attack during the paper, a recent bereavement of someone close, a serious family crisis, or a major disturbance during the exam itself. The bereavement point surprises people - the rules explicitly recognise that grief close to an exam affects performance, so if you have lost someone, your school should know.
What it is not for: nerves in the ordinary sense, a bad night's sleep, misreading the timetable, or revision that didn't get done. Those are rough, but they are part of exams rather than an interruption to them. If you are unsure which side of the line your situation falls, ask your exams officer anyway - judging that is their job, not yours, and asking costs nothing.
How much difference does it make?
Be realistic here: the adjustment is a small percentage of the paper's marks, tiered to the severity of the circumstances. It will not turn a paper that went badly into a top grade, and it is not a re-mark - nobody re-reads your answers. What it does is nudge a total, and grades are decided at boundaries: a few marks is precisely the gap between one grade and the next for thousands of students every year. Modest, but worth having.
How to actually get it: speak up the same week
The application goes from your school to the exam board - you and your parents cannot send one directly. That makes one thing essential: the school has to know what happened, quickly. The boards set tight deadlines for applications after each exam, so this is a same-week conversation, not one to save for results day, when it is far too late.
Tell your exams officer, head of year or form tutor what happened and when, and bring what evidence you can - a GP or hospital note, or in cases like bereavement simply the facts, which the school can confirm. It can feel awkward to say out loud; say it anyway. Exams officers handle these applications every single season, and the students they can't help are the ones who never told them.