Access Arrangements And Fairness Internationally

Every major exam system tries to give disabled and SEN students a fair chance to show what they know — but the legal basis, who applies, and what's on offer differ noticeably between countries. In the UK, schools apply for extra time, readers, scribes or rest breaks under shared rules set by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), covering all five awarding bodies. In the US, accommodations on the SAT or ACT go through a separate application to the College Board or ACT under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The International Baccalaureate runs its own school-administered process. This is a subject that affects real children with real, sometimes lifelong, disabilities — the detail is worth getting right, and treating with care.

What "access arrangements" means in the UK

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, access arrangements is the umbrella term for adjustments made to how a student sits an exam, not to what the exam assesses. The Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) sets one shared set of regulations that every UK awarding body — AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, WJEC/Eduqas and CCEA — follows, so a student's entitlement doesn't depend on which board their school happens to use.

The most familiar arrangements are:

• Extra time — most commonly 25%, applied to the length of the exam.
• A reader — for candidates whose disability affects their ability to read the paper accurately themselves. Notably, a human reader is not permitted in any exam that is itself assessing reading ability; a computer reader may be used instead in some cases.
• A scribe — for candidates whose disability or injury affects their ability to write. Scribes must be trained, cannot be the candidate's own subject teacher for that paper, and must follow precise rules so the support they give doesn't cross into providing answers.
• Supervised rest breaks — JCQ's more recent guidance encourages centres to try rest breaks first, before applying for extra time, for students whose impairment isn't a learning difficulty.

Crucially, the school or college applies, not the parent directly. Applications are made through JCQ's online system and generally require supporting evidence — often an assessment from a specialist assessor, alongside evidence of the student's "normal way of working" in ordinary lessons and internal assessments, since an arrangement is meant to reflect how a student already works, not confer an advantage they don't otherwise need.

How common is this, really?

According to Ofqual's own published statistics for the 2024 to 2025 academic year, 25% extra time was approved for somewhere between roughly 16.6% and 25.5% of GCSE, AS and A-level candidates in England, depending on the qualification — meaning, in round terms, that a sizeable minority of students in any given exam hall are sitting under some adjusted arrangement. This is worth parents knowing simply because it corrects a common assumption that access arrangements are rare or exceptional; within a system this large, they are a routine and well-established part of how exams are run fairly.

The legal basis: the Equality Act 2010

The underlying legal requirement in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is the Equality Act 2010, which requires schools, colleges and examining bodies to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled students aren't put at a substantial disadvantage compared with their peers. Exam boards, as bodies that set assessments, fall within its scope — access arrangements are essentially how that legal duty is operationalised in practice for exam-hall conditions.

How other systems handle it

The United States takes a structurally different path for its major standardised tests. Accommodations on the SAT and ACT — extended time, a reader, a scribe, a separate testing room, and others — are granted under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), but through a separate application process run by the College Board (for the SAT) or ACT, Inc. Having an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or a 504 Plan at school does not automatically transfer to these external tests; families typically need to apply well in advance — commonly around seven weeks before a test date — with documentation that meets the testing organisation's own criteria, which can differ from a school's threshold for support. This is a genuine practical trap for families moving from a UK-style system, where the school itself administers the exam board's own arrangement, into a US-style system where the test provider is a separate gatekeeper from the school.

The International Baccalaureate runs its own system of inclusive assessment arrangements, again applied for by the student's IB World School rather than by families directly, through the IB's own online system. A commonly cited IB benchmark for extra time in examinations is around 10 minutes per hour, though the IB frames its overall approach around a principle of "optimal support" — adjustments should be no more, and no less, than what a student genuinely needs, and must reflect how a student already works during ordinary teaching and assessment, not just the exam itself.

France takes a third, distinctly different route again. Adjustments to the baccalauréat and other national exams — known as aménagements d'épreuves ("exam adjustments") — are formally decided by a doctor appointed by the Commission des Droits et de l'Autonomie des Personnes Handicapées (CDAPH), the disability-rights body attached to each département's local disability authority (the MDPH, Maison Départementale des Personnes Handicapées), rather than by the school or exam board directly. A family applies through the MDPH, a doctor examines the medical and educational evidence, and the resulting recommendation — which might include extra time, a computer, a scribe, or adapted exam papers — is then binding on the exam authorities. It's a genuinely different model from all three above: not school-led like the UK and IB, and not test-provider-led like the US, but routed through a public health and disability body that sits outside education entirely.

What's similar, and what's different

The details differ, but the underlying principle is consistent across every system covered here: an access arrangement exists to remove a barrier to showing what a student knows, not to change what's being assessed or to hand any student an advantage they don't need.

Moving country with an existing arrangement

A family with an approved UK access arrangement who then moves abroad mid-course faces the same practical truth as moving country mid-GCSE generally: nothing transfers automatically. A JCQ-approved arrangement is meaningful only within the JCQ system: it isn't recognised by the College Board, the IB, or a French MDPH simply because it was approved at the previous school. The evidence behind it — an educational psychologist's report, a specialist assessment, a documented history of "normal way of working" — is usually reusable, but it has to be resubmitted through whichever system the family is moving into, on that system's own terms and often against its own diagnostic thresholds. Building in time for this is exactly the kind of detail worth raising with the current school's SENCO at the first sign a move might happen, not after it's confirmed.

A note on tone

This is one of the few topics in this cluster where getting a number slightly wrong, or implying an arrangement is somehow a shortcut, does real harm to how disabled students and their families are perceived. If your child is going through this process, the most useful next step is almost always a direct conversation with the school's SENCO (Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator), who will know the current JCQ rules and evidence requirements in detail — this article is a map of the landscape, not a substitute for that conversation.