In December 2016 the Department for Education (DfE) launched a consultation asking for views on A Level (and AS) subject content for Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Greek, Modern Hebrew, Japanese, Panjabi, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish and Urdu.
New qualifications based on this content will be first taught in schools and colleges in Autumn 2018.
Subject content requirements become regulatory documents, which set out the minimum knowledge, understanding and skills needed for AS and A Level qualifications, or GCSEs as appropriate. Subject content provides the framework for awarding organisations to create the detail of qualification specifications.
Ofqual, the independent regulator, is responsible for determining the assessment arrangements. Ofqual therefore consulted in parallel on assessment arrangements for these subjects, including the assessment objectives. For a full understanding of how students will be expected to engage with these qualifications, contributors to the consultation were encouraged to consider both the content and the assessment arrangements.
Read the Association for Language Learning’s response to the DfE consultation here, and to the Ofqual consultation, read here.