3 things every MFL teacher needs to know about the GCSE speaking exams

If you only know these three things about the new AQA and Edexcel French, German and Spanish speaking exams, you'll go far!

I know that the new speaking exams are on a lot of MFL teachers' minds at the moment. As you get closer to the exams, I'm sure you have more questions than ever - don't forget to ask them in my MFL GCSE (2026) Facebook group, where we have a weekly "Ask me anything" post. There's no such thing as a silly question, and it's better to ask now and get it right than keep quiet and get told off by the exam boards haha!

With that in mind, here are the 3 key things I think every MFL Teacher needs to know about these exams (based on the questions we get regularly in the Facebook group):

1. Timings for individual elements are just guidelines. The only time that really matters is the overall time limit, as they will stop marking the exam after this cut off point. If you get through the role-play, reading aloud and picture really quickly, you don't need to drag out the conversation for the rest of the time, either. You can stop before the minimum time limit, if you feel the candidate has said enough to get full marks or said as much as they possibly can.

2. The follow-on conversation after the photo cards is exactly that. It needs to sound like a conversation, rather than a pre-learnt list of questions that you ask the candidate in order. As the teacher-examiner, you must respond to what they're saying, ask them to elaborate (a simple "why" is enough here) and let the conversation flow. The exam boards are quite clear on this and I do think that centres will be penalised for firing off a list of set questions at their candidates rather than making it sound like a conversation. From what I've read in Facebook groups, in mock exams, students have done better when the conversation is more natural, because they aren't stressing about remembering a load of pre-learnt answers, so this is promising.

3. Candidates can write whatever they want in the prep time. They can write full sentences, with conjugated verbs, tenses, they can write out the cases table in German (which I did in my own GCSEs 😂), etc. The only thing that AQA students can't do is annotate the reading aloud, as everything has to be on a separate piece of paper. Edexcel students may annotate the reading aloud, however, but it must then be handed in after they finish that section of the test.

There are lots of board-specific details that you also need to know, but these are 3 universal truths for both AQA and Edexcel, and if you are aware of them, you'll go far!

For a more detailed run-down of each board, you can now get the recordings of my speaking exam workshops, plus the accompanying PPTs on the Kate Languages website. These recordings are included in the speaking exam bundles, which many of you have already bought, and of course they are in with the CPD bundle you get with Buy Everything. I've decided to make them available separately, however, as so many of you have so many questions about these exams. I genuinely refer back to them every time I answer a question in the Facebook group, and the info hasn't changed much since I did them, so they are completely relevant still.