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The spoken language endorsement, explained
Alongside the GCSE English Language exams, your child gives a short formal presentation and answers questions on it. It gets its own grade, separate from the 9 to 1 grade. How it works and how to help.
As part of GCSE English Language, your child prepares a presentation, gives it to an audience and answers questions about it. Their teacher assesses it. AQA calls this the spoken language endorsement, and it has its own grade: Pass, Merit, Distinction or Not Classified. AQA reports it as a separate grade alongside the GCSE, and it does not count towards the 9 to 1 grade.
What your child has to do
AQA’s specification for GCSE English Language sets out the task:
- The presentation is planned and formal, on a topic your child agrees with their teacher in advance.
- It can take several forms, including a talk, a speech, a debate or a dialogue.
- As a guide, AQA says the whole assessment should last no more than ten minutes.
- Notes or slides are allowed but not required.
- Your child has to listen and respond to questions and feedback from the audience.
- At every grade, they have to be audible and use spoken Standard English: speech that others can follow, in language that suits a formal setting.
The audience can be the class or just the teacher. If it is only the teacher, the presentation still has to be designed so that it could work for a wider audience. Some presentations are filmed, because AQA asks each school for complete, unedited recordings of a sample of students, questions included, to check the grading.
How it is graded
There are no marks. AQA lists a few criteria for each grade, and your child has to meet all of them to get that grade. In plain terms:
- Pass: straightforward ideas, an attempt to organise the presentation and to suit the audience, and straightforward answers to questions.
- Merit: challenging ideas and a range of vocabulary, a clear structure that suits the audience, a presentation that achieves its purpose, and formal answers in some detail.
- Distinction: sophisticated ideas and vocabulary, a range of ways to engage the audience, a presentation that achieves its purpose, and perceptive answers that add further ideas where that helps.
A presentation that does not reach the Pass standard is recorded as Not Classified.
When it happens
The school decides when to run it. For the June 2027 exams, AQA’s deadline for schools to submit the endorsement is Friday 7 May 2027.
If your child resits English Language later, the school can carry the endorsement grade forward, even to another exam board. If there has been more than one attempt, the most recent grade counts, including a Not Classified.
Helping your child prepare
- Help them choose a topic they know well and have a view on. Merit asks for challenging ideas, and Distinction for sophisticated ones, so a topic with something to argue or explain gives them more to work with.
- Plan the shape together: an opening that says what the talk is about and why it matters, a few sections in a sensible order, and an ending that comes back to the main point.
- Keep notes short, a few words per card, so that your child talks to the audience and does not read aloud.
- Practise out loud, standing up, with a timer. Aim to leave a few minutes of the ten for questions.
- Ask questions at the end, including one they will not expect and one that disagrees with them. Answering formally and in some detail is part of a Merit.
- Listen for slips into casual speech, for example we was for we were, and agree a formal way to say the same thing.
- Film one run-through on a phone and watch it back together.
If your child has a speech, language or hearing need, or finds speaking to a group very hard, talk to their English teacher or the special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) well before the date.