We believe it’s vital that every student has the best opportunity to demonstrate what they know, understand and can do. Over the last few years, we‘ve been making improvements to the materials students use such as question papers and sample assessment materials, making them more accessible. We continually review new research and feedback to inform this work.
Our aim is to ensure that no student is disadvantaged by not being able to access questions or tasks in an assessment.
We’ve developed accessibility principles that we use to write our assessment materials and develop new qualifications. Our principles are based on feedback from teachers, our own technical research and have been written in collaboration with accessibility organisations, such as the British Association of Teachers of the Deaf. We continually review our principles to ensure they meet the latest research and feedback.
We hope that students and teachers have noticed and will continue to notice the changes in our question papers and other assessment materials. Changes can be seen in formatting, language and context.
Here are some of the things we’re doing to make our assessment materials more accessible:
Formatting
To make our materials easier to read:
- text is usually in Arial 11 and is generally left aligned and left justified.
- we only use italics where the subject requires.
- we generally start each new instruction on a new line.
- we use bold to emphasise key words.
Language
To make our materials as clear as possible:
- we use familiar spoken vocabulary.
- we limit technical and specialist words to those in the specification.
- we use short and simple sentences.
- we avoid unnecessary words.
- we use terminology consistently.
Context
To make our materials as accessible as possible:
- we use contexts that students are likely to be familiar with.
- we avoid context that is irrelevant to the questions or tasks.
- we avoid using people’s names or organisation names where possible.
- where we must use people’s names we take them from a set list of equality, diversity and inclusion-approved accessibly written names.
Therefore, during the lifetime of the qualification, you might see small adjustments to the question papers. This is part of continuous improvement, designed to help you and your students. We recommend you look at the most recent set of past papers, where available.
Please provide your feedback to us through methods such as post-exam surveys as this really helps inform our activities. Back to top
