AQA — the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance — is a registered educational charity that awards GCSEs, A-levels and other qualifications across England, with entries from schools throughout the UK. It has no shareholders, was formed from mergers of older examining bodies, and is one of the largest of the five UK awarding bodies by the volume of exams it sets and marks each year.
If your child's school uses AQA specifications, it's worth knowing what kind of organisation is actually behind the paper they sit — because AQA's structure (a charity, not a company) is one of the clearer contrasts within the five-board system covered in why the UK has five exam boards at all.
What AQA is
AQA is registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales as an educational charity. That status matters structurally: a charity has no shareholders to pay dividends to, and any financial surplus it makes must, under charity law, be reinvested in its charitable purpose — in AQA's case, the development, delivery and administration of qualifications — rather than distributed as profit. This puts AQA in a different structural category from Pearson Edexcel, which is part of a listed, for-profit company.
AQA describes its purpose as advancing education through the provision of assessment, and its governance includes a board of trustees who hold the same fiduciary duties as trustees of any other UK charity — accountable to the Charity Commission as well as to Ofqual as the qualifications regulator.
Where AQA came from
AQA's current form dates to 2000, but it is the product of a longer chain of mergers among older, independent examining bodies. Two of its principal predecessors were the Associated Examining Board (AEB) and the Northern Examinations and Assessment Board (NEAB), both of which were themselves the products of earlier consolidations among 20th-century examining unions and syndicates. When these bodies combined, the resulting organisation took the name Assessment and Qualifications Alliance — AQA.
This pattern of merger-not-replacement is typical of how the UK's exam-board landscape reached its current shape, as the history of UK exam boards from 1858 to today sets out in more detail: rather than a single national board being created and older bodies abolished, boards absorbed one another repeatedly across more than a century, with AQA representing one of the largest such consolidations.
What AQA awards
AQA's core, most widely recognised qualifications are GCSEs and A-levels, sat by hundreds of thousands of students in England each year, with additional entries from schools in Wales, Northern Ireland and beyond that choose to teach AQA specifications. Beyond these, AQA also awards:
- Applied General and vocational qualifications, aimed at students who want a more practical or industry-linked route alongside or instead of traditional A-levels.
- Extended Project Qualifications (EPQs), an independent research project increasingly used to support university applications.
- Entry Level Certificates, designed for students working towards, but not yet ready for, full GCSE-level study.
The full current list of subjects and qualification types is maintained on AQA's own website, which is the authoritative source for what's currently on offer in any given academic year, since specifications are periodically retired or revised.
How large is AQA, really?
AQA is consistently described as one of the largest of the five awarding bodies by GCSE and A-level entry volume, but exact market share varies by subject and by year, and neither AQA nor Ofqual publishes a single definitive "market share" figure that holds constant across subjects — some subjects are dominated by one board, others are far more evenly split between two or three. Rather than quote a specific percentage that would be out of date within a year, the safest statement is structural: AQA is regularly one of the two largest boards in England for GCSE and A-level entries, alongside Pearson Edexcel, with OCR and Eduqas typically smaller by volume nationally, though OCR and Eduqas remain significant, and in some subjects and regions are the majority choice.
How AQA compares to the other England boards on structure
Structure is the easiest thing to compare across the three boards that operate mainly in England, because it doesn't shift year to year the way entry numbers do:
| AQA | Pearson Edexcel | OCR | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legal form | Registered educational charity | Part of Pearson plc, a listed for-profit company | Part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge |
| Shareholders | None | Yes — Pearson plc shareholders | None (university department) |
| Formed from | Mergers including AEB and NEAB, settling on the AQA name in 2000 | The London Examinations board becoming part of Pearson | A 1998 merger of the Oxford and Cambridge boards with RSA |
| Regulator (England) | Ofqual | Ofqual | Ofqual |
The regulator is identical across the row — Ofqual sets the same conditions on question-setting and grading for all three — which is precisely why the ownership column is the more informative one for a parent trying to understand what kind of organisation is behind the paper. Pearson Edexcel and OCR are covered in full elsewhere on this site.
How AQA actually sets and grades an exam
The practical process behind an AQA GCSE is worth walking through, because it demystifies what "the exam board" does beyond printing a paper. Subject teams of examiners — practising or former teachers working alongside AQA staff — draft questions against the published specification, which is itself written to meet Ofqual's subject-level requirements (for example, the proportion of marks that must test extended writing in English, or practical skills in science). Draft papers go through review and moderation before they're finalised, then sat under identical conditions nationally on a set date set by JCQ, the umbrella body the five boards use to coordinate the exam timetable so subjects don't clash.
After marking, AQA doesn't simply apply a fixed mark-to-grade table from one year to the next. It uses statistical evidence — including the prior attainment of the cohort sitting the exam, drawn from their earlier test results — to help a panel of senior examiners decide where each grade boundary should fall that year, under Ofqual's "comparable outcomes" approach. The aim is that a grade 7 should represent a broadly similar standard year on year, even if a particular paper turned out harder or easier than intended. This is the same mechanism used by Pearson Edexcel and OCR, and it's covered in far more depth in how grade boundaries are actually set.
Does charity status make AQA's exams easier or harder?
No — and this is a common misreading of what "charity" means here. AQA's charitable status describes what happens to its money, not how it sets grade boundaries or how difficult its papers are. Because all boards sit under the same Ofqual comparable-outcomes framework, a charity structure gives AQA no latitude to make its qualifications easier to attract more schools, nor any commercial incentive to make them harder. Any perception that one board is "easier" than another in a particular subject is almost always about differences in question style, specification content or teaching fit rather than the board's legal form — see does your child's exam board actually matter? for the evidence on this.
Regulation and standards
Because AQA operates mainly in England, its regulated qualifications sit under Ofqual, which sets the conditions AQA must meet for question-setting, examiner training, marking quality, and how grade boundaries are determined each year. This is the same regulatory framework that applies to Pearson Edexcel and OCR, and it means AQA does not independently set how hard its exams are to pass — Ofqual's comparable-outcomes approach is designed to keep grading standards aligned across all the Ofqual-regulated boards, a point covered in more depth in our explainer on whether schools pick the "easiest" board.
Why a school might choose AQA
Individual departments choose AQA specifications for reasons that are usually pedagogical rather than reputational: how a topic sequence is structured, the balance between exam papers and any non-exam assessment, the style of question-setting, or simply familiarity built up over years of teaching a particular specification well. A school might teach AQA English but OCR Geography, and that mix is entirely normal — see does your child's exam board actually matter? for what, if anything, this choice means for your child's outcomes.
A note on the name
"AQA" is sometimes assumed by parents to be an acronym for something exam-specific, but it stands simply for Assessment and Qualifications Alliance — a name chosen at the 2000 merger to reflect the coming-together of the predecessor examining bodies, rather than a reference to any particular subject or qualification type.
The short version
AQA is a charity, not a company; it was built through mergers of older UK examining bodies over the 20th century and settled into its current form and name in 2000; and it sits, like Pearson Edexcel and OCR, under Ofqual's regulatory oversight in England. Its charitable status is the single clearest structural fact that separates it from Pearson Edexcel, the one board among the five that operates as part of a for-profit, publicly listed company.