Who Actually Writes GCSE and A-Level Exam Questions?

GCSE and A-level questions are written by teams of examiners recruited and employed by the awarding bodies — AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas — mostly practising or recently retired teachers, working under a strict confidentiality and security regime rather than in a single government department. This is a structurally different model from countries where a state ministry or agency writes the one national exam paper everyone sits.

Parents often assume there must be a single, official "exam paper" written by the government, in the same way there's a National Curriculum. There isn't. Because England, Wales and Northern Ireland run a multi-board system, each awarding body writes its own version of every qualification, to its own specification, sat by different schools depending on which board that school has chosen for that subject. Understanding who actually sits down and writes the questions — and how those questions stay secret until exam day — explains a lot about how the system works day to day.

Who the setters actually are

Awarding bodies recruit question setters through open applications, and the overwhelming majority are people with real classroom experience: serving teachers, heads of department, or recently retired teachers who know the specification and the age group first-hand. AQA and other boards openly advertise for examiners and setters on their websites, and being a marker or setter is a recognised (if part-time and modestly paid) role many teachers take on alongside their day job. A smaller core of full-time assessment specialists, employed directly by the awarding body, coordinate the process, write mark schemes, and manage quality control.

This matters for a simple reason: the people setting your child's exam questions have usually stood in front of a classroom of exactly that age group, which shapes both the content and the way it's phrased.

From a blank page to a locked question paper

A typical question paper goes through several stages before it is finalised:

1. Drafting. A setter (or small team) writes a full paper against the syllabus and assessment objectives set out in the board's specification.
2. Internal review. Other examiners and the board's assessment staff check the paper for accuracy, fairness, appropriate difficulty, and whether it actually tests what it claims to test.
3. Scrutiny or moderation panels. A dedicated panel reviews the paper as a whole — checking balance across topics, that no question repeats too closely from a recent past paper, and that the mark scheme is workable.
4. Pre-testing or trialling, used for some question types, where new material is tried out on a small, unconnected group of students before it appears on a live paper.
5. Final sign-off, printing and secure storage, typically many months before the exam is actually sat.

Every stage adds people who see the paper before students do, which is exactly why the confidentiality regime around it is so tightly controlled.

How the secrecy actually works

Everyone involved in writing, reviewing or printing a paper signs a confidentiality agreement, and awarding bodies operate under conduct rules set out by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) — the body that governs how exams are administered in schools and colleges across the UK. Question papers are printed and distributed under a tracked chain of custody, arrive at schools sealed, and by JCQ rules can only be opened in a controlled way shortly before the exam starts, with exam officers required to record and account for every packet. Ofqual, the regulator for England, sets conditions that require awarding bodies to have robust security processes for producing and protecting their assessment materials, and investigates any breach.

The result is a layered system: no single person writes a paper alone, no single person could leak it alone, and the paper itself is physically controlled from the printer to the exam hall.

How this compares with a state-run exam

Many countries take a completely different structural approach: one national body writes one exam, sat by (almost) everyone.

• South Korea's Suneung (CSAT) is written by the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE), a government-affiliated body. Question-setters are famously sequestered — housed together with no phone or internet access for a period of roughly a month while the paper is finalised — a security measure built around a single, single-sitting national exam where a leak would be a national crisis.
• France's baccalauréat is organised nationally by the Ministry of Education, which sets the syllabus and, for many subjects, national papers sat on the same day across the country. Question-setting is coordinated through the ministry's own examination structures rather than competing commercial bodies.
• China's Gaokao mixes a national paper set by the Ministry of Education with province-specific papers set by provincial education authorities, reflecting the sheer scale and regional variation of the system — but in both cases it is a state body doing the writing, not an independent organisation competing for a school's business.
• Japan's kyotsu tesuto (Common Test for University Admissions) sits between the two models. A single national body — the National Center for University Entrance Examinations — writes one common first-stage test that most university applicants sit. But unlike South Korea, France or China, that common test is only the first hurdle: individual universities then set and mark their own second-stage entrance exams for the courses they offer, so the "who writes the questions" answer splits between one national body and hundreds of individual universities, depending on which stage of the process you mean.

At a glance

Why England's model looks different

England's decision to allow several independent, competing awarding bodies to each write their own version of a qualification is comparatively unusual internationally. It means a school choosing AQA for GCSE Geography and OCR for GCSE History is opting into two entirely separately written and separately marked exams, produced by two organisations with their own setters, their own scrutiny panels, and their own security arrangements — all regulated to the same standard by Ofqual, but operating independently of one another. It is one reason a UK parent moving from a single-exam-board country can find the system's plurality genuinely surprising, even though the underlying goal — a secure, fair, nationally-recognised qualification — is the same.

What happens if a paper leaks

The security process described above exists precisely because papers do, occasionally, leak — and how a board responds is as instructive as the security itself. In 2017, a GCSE mathematics paper was found circulating on social media before it had been sat, and Pearson Edexcel launched an investigation into how it had escaped the chain of custody. The response followed the pattern JCQ's rules are built around: the affected paper was investigated separately from every other paper and every other board, rather than treated as evidence that the whole system had failed, and any student advantage identified was dealt with through the specific case rather than a blanket re-sit. That containment is one practical benefit of a multi-board system that rarely gets mentioned alongside its costs — a security failure at one board, in one subject, in one year, does not automatically compromise a national cohort's results the way it would if a single national paper were the only version in existence. Ofqual can, and does, investigate and require boards to take corrective action, and a serious enough incident can still trigger a full inquiry.

Can anyone apply to become a setter?

In principle, yes — awarding bodies run open recruitment for examiners and question setters, usually advertised on their own websites, and don't require a personal connection to get started. In practice, boards look for a specific combination: recent or current teaching experience in the subject and specification concerned, a track record of strong classroom results, and (once appointed) a willingness to sign the confidentiality agreements and undergo the vetting checks — including standard safeguarding checks — that come with handling live assessment material. Most setters start as markers before moving into question-writing roles, so the route into it typically runs through marking first rather than applying directly to write papers from day one.

The takeaway

Whichever system a country uses, the two problems being solved are identical: get the questions right, and keep them secret until the exam starts. England solves both problems through multiple competing, closely regulated organisations staffed largely by practising teachers; many other countries solve the same problems with a single state body and, in some cases, remarkably strict physical measures like sequestering the people who wrote the paper. Neither approach is inherently more secure — they are simply different answers to the same structural question of who gets to write what your child sits.