Whether you're preparing your Year 11 students completing this year or have started the first year of assessments with your Year 10s, we're here to support you on this journey.
Take advantage of our detailed guidance below outlining essential tasks, deadlines, and submission guidelines to ensure your preparation for moderation in the January 2026 series is seamless.
The terminal rule is a requirement for all technical awards offered to 14-16 year-olds. The exam must be taken in the student's final assessment series. This rule does impact when you submit your NEA units so it is essential you understand the terminal rule when making your entries.
The set assignments are released in the June prior to the start of the new academic year each year. You can download them from Teach Cambridge. Before you start marking, double check that your students have completed the correct set assignment.
The assignments for submission in the January 2026 series will have ‘Valid for assessment in the January and June 2026 assessment series only’ on the front cover (except for Sport Studies unit R185 and Enterprise and Marketing unit R069 as these assignments do not change each year).
To support your marking, make sure you've:
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Don't forget, before you submit the marks, you need to inform your students of their centre assessed marks, and give them enough time to appeal these marks. You must allow sufficient time for the review to be carried out, to make any necessary changes to the marks and inform the student to the outcome before the marks submission deadline of 10 January 2026 for the January 2026 series. |
Once your students' marks have been submitted, your exams officer will receive sample requests, starting from 5 January 2026, asking you to submit evidence for external moderation.
To help you, we’ve listed and included links to the candidate evidence and forms you'll need to complete and submit for each Cambridge National subject. View your subjects below.
Read our blog Marking and feedback for Cambridge Nationals where we share some hints and tips for marking and providing support and feedback to students undertaking the NEA tasks.
For all units you need to include:
Plus for unit R058
For all units you need to include:
Find digital submission guidance towards the bottom of this page.
For all units you need to include:
Plus for units R039 and R040
Find digital submission guidance towards the bottom of this page.
For all units you need to include:
Plus for units R015 and R016
Find digital submission guidance towards the bottom of this page.
For all units you need to include:
Plus for units R048 and R049
Find digital submission guidance towards the bottom of this page.
For all units you need to include:
Plus for unit R069
For all units you need to include:
Plus for units R034 and R035
For all units you need to include:
Find digital submission guidance towards the bottom of this page.
For all units you need to include:
Plus for unit R181
For all units you need to include:
Plus for units R185 and R187
There are three other forms which need to be completed. These documents should be kept on file by your centre and available to Cambridge OCR upon request.
7 – 9 January 2026 – see page 3 of our exam timetable for dates by subject
In preparation to meet the relevant deadlines, it's important to have a discussion with your exams officer ahead of time to determine who will be responsible for submitting the marks and uploading or posting the samples.
Marks should be submitted electronically via Interchange or EDI via A2C by the 10 January 2026 deadline. Detailed instructions on how do this can be found on our administration web pages.
Remember: you don't need to wait until 10 January 2026. You can submit your marks from 26 September 2025.
Your exams officer will receive an email containing sample request details usually within one to two days from when you submitted the marks. You'll then have three working days to submit your sample.
You'll start to receive your sample requests from 5 January 2026.
The size of the sample request will depends on the number of candidates for the relevant unit/component. Full details can be found on our administration web pages but if you have a cohort of 15 or fewer candidates, you don't need to wait for a sample request as you'll need to submit the work for the whole cohort.
Please note: If you're part of a consortium we'll wait until we have received marks from each centre before sending a sample request.
Once you've submitted your marks, your exams officer will receive a sample request via email within one to two days, asking you to submit evidence for external moderation.
You may have chosen to submit your samples via post. The samples must be posted within three working days of receiving the request.
Details on how to submit via post is on our website including if you're sending digitally on a USB.
| For Creative iMedia and IT work MUST be submitted via USB. Hard copy submission is not available. |
Submit for Assessment is our digital submission service for uploading and submitting candidate work. If you've chosen the upload to OCR option as your submission option method, this is the platform you must use. Please make sure you or your exams officer is set up to use Submit for Assessment in plenty of time before you submit your marks.
Submit for Assessment opens 12 December 2025 for the submission of student work. You'll be able to submit if you have a cohort of 15 or fewer students. If you have more than 15 students, you’ll need to wait until you receive your sample request from 5 January 2026 to know which students work to upload.
There are detailed instructions on how to use Submit for Assessment on our website.
The URS for the students in the sample should be Zipped and uploaded to the ‘component level’ section in Submit for Assessment.
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For Creative iMedia, IT, and Engineering Design, Manufacture and Programmable Systems, please remember to zip your students' folders before uploading files to Submit for Assessment. This is necessary so that folder structures are retained. Please keep the URS separate when uploading to the 'component level' section. |
If you have any questions about moderation and submissions, our team are here to support you.
You can get in touch with the team Monday - Friday 08:00 - 17:00 via the following:
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