Reformed GCSE French, German and Spanish 2026: What has changed

The reformed GCSE French, German and Spanish specifications were first taught from September 2024, and summer 2026 was the first exam series in the new format. If you are a Year 10 or Year 11 student starting the course now, you are working to the reformed spec across all four exam boards in England (AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, and WJEC Eduqas).

This guide covers what changed in the reform, what stayed the same, and what the first outcomes looked like once Ofqual and the boards published data from the summer 2026 series. If you want a full subject revision guide, our complete GCSE Spanish revision guide goes topic by topic.

The reform was proposed by the Department for Education in a consultation in March 2021 and confirmed in January 2022, with Ofqual then setting the assessment rules. It made four main changes to how GCSE French, German and Spanish work.

First, a defined vocabulary list is now central to the course. Foundation-tier students study 1,200 words; Higher-tier students study those 1,200 plus another 500, for a total of 1,700. At least 85% of the words on each vocabulary list must come from the 2,000 most frequent words in the language, and the exams are built from that list (with a small allowance, up to 2% of a text, for unlisted cognates or glossed words). Cognates and near-cognates (like French "restaurant") are not listed because they are recognisable across languages already.

Second, boards can add up to 30 multi-word phrases and up to 20 items naming relevant places, events or countries in addition to the base vocabulary. These are things like idiomatic set phrases and named cultural references (festivals, historical figures) that go beyond a single-word lookup.

Third, there is a defined grammar list, with some items marked as receptive-only (students need to understand them when they see them, but not produce them themselves). This is a shift from the old spec, where grammar expectations were less explicit.

Fourth, the speaking assessment (worth 25% of the total marks, unchanged) has a tighter format. AQA's speaking test has three tasks: a role-play, a reading-aloud task followed by a short conversation, and a photo card task. Each student's cards are allocated by the board using a sequence chart, so practise across all the themes rather than a few favourite cards.

Not everything changed, and knowing what carried over is useful for parents who took the previous version. The tiering structure is the same: Foundation tier targets grades 1-5, Higher tier targets grades 4-9, and a student sits all four papers at the same tier. The single-tier-of-entry rule (all skills at the same tier) is retained.

The four assessed skills are also unchanged: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, each worth 25% of the total. Speaking is still a separate exam paper: it is conducted and recorded by your teacher during a set window, then marked by the exam board's examiners.

English translation is still part of the paper. On the reformed spec, both a translation from the target language into English (in the reading paper) and a translation from English into the target language (in the writing paper) are included, similarly to the previous version.

The 1,200 and 1,700 word figures are the ones that get the most attention, and it is worth being precise about what they mean. The Department for Education set the content standard: 1,200 words at Foundation, plus 500 more at Higher, drawn from high-frequency corpora. Each awarding body then publishes its own vocabulary list from that corpus, and the lists differ slightly between boards.

For a Year 10 starting the course now, the practical implication is that vocabulary revision is more targeted than it used to be. You know the list. Boards publish it. What you see in the exam has to be drawn from the list (the list itself is at least 85% top-2,000 words) plus up to 30 multi-word phrases and up to 20 cultural or place-name items your board adds. There is no more "the examiner might throw in anything" uncertainty at word level.

That does not make the exam easier, because the marks are in the skill of using the vocabulary, not the size of the pool. But it does change what an efficient revision plan looks like: get the list, learn it in chunks (say 20-30 words a week from Year 10), and drill recall regularly. Our how to revise effectively guide covers spaced repetition, which is the study method built for this kind of task.

The grammar list is now explicitly defined, and some items are marked receptive-only. In practice this means students need to recognise, say, a particular tense or construction in a listening or reading passage, without being expected to produce it themselves in the writing or speaking parts.

What is productive versus receptive varies by tier and by board. The AQA specification, for example, sets out its full grammar list with the productive and receptive split marked. It is worth going through this list with your teacher early in Year 10, because it changes what you drill in writing practice versus what you drill purely for comprehension.

The speaking exam is still worth 25% of the total. Your teacher conducts and records it, and the exam board marks it. What changed is the task card structure. AQA's speaking test has three tasks: a role-play, a reading-aloud task followed by a short conversation, and a photo card task. Each student's cards are allocated by the board using a sequence chart, so practise across all the themes rather than a few favourite cards.

The read-aloud element is one of the more visible additions. Students read a short passage aloud in the target language and then answer questions in a short conversation on a related theme, which tests pronunciation and comprehension together. Other boards have their own format under the same overall reform framework, so check your specific specification for the format your teacher is preparing you for.

Ofqual's results-day blog on 20 August 2026 covered how the summer 2026 series went for the reformed languages. The headline point: outcomes were "slightly higher" than 2025 in all three subjects, with first-cohort protection applied. First-cohort protection is a standard mechanism Ofqual uses when a new specification is examined for the first time: boards set grade boundaries to ensure that the students sitting the reformed exam are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged relative to the previous cohort.

The important thing to understand: the slight rise is not evidence that the reformed spec is easier. Boundaries were set to protect the first cohort, so a small uplift in raw pass rates does not tell you anything about the underlying difficulty of the paper. It is worth waiting for results from later exam series before drawing conclusions about difficulty.

On entry numbers, Ofqual's provisional entries for summer 2026 showed French at about 121,000 (down 5.5% on 2025), German at about 32,500 (broadly flat) and Spanish at about 133,000 (up slightly). Spanish overtook French in entry volume in the previous cycle and stayed ahead in 2026. If you want the current uptake picture across subjects, our most popular GCSEs guide has the full ranking.

The reformed spec rewards students who work consistently through the vocabulary list from the start of Year 10 rather than trying to cram it in the final term. Because so much is defined (list, grammar, speaking tasks), the reward for a structured revision plan is higher than it was under the old spec. Our complete GCSE Spanish revision guide gives a topic-by-topic breakdown for Spanish specifically.