Subjects and qualifications

Before you contact a school or college to enter as a private candidate, you need to know which subject and qualification you want to study.

What is available?

Bear in mind that:

• not all qualifications are available to private candidates, especially those which are practical in nature (eg Art and Design)
• if you wish to study a subject that isn't available to private candidates, you will have to find a school or college that is willing to enter you as an internal student and conduct your assessments

The following pages contain an overview of the qualifications and subjects that are available to private candidates, plus details of any special restrictions/conditions:

• AS and A-level
• GCSE
• AQA Certificate and Functional Skills

Finding subject information

• Find specifications (syllabuses) and other subject information through our qualifications page.
• Find past papers and mark schemes, or specimen papers for new courses.

As a private candidate, it's up to you to read your subject specifications and to be aware of the requirements. If you have any queries about the content of the specifications, please contact the relevant customer support team.

We don't offer any courses of study, and we can't provide information on courses offered by schools or colleges.

Discount (classification) codes

Each specification has a subject group classification code (sometimes called a discount code) set by the Department for Education (DfE) which describes where it belongs.

You should be aware that if you take two specifications with the same classification code, schools, colleges, universities and employers are very likely to take the view that you have achieved only one of the two qualifications.

Up-to-date codes are also shown in our Entry codes.