Year 10: the first GCSE year, and the first real exams

Year 10 is where the work starts counting. Wales is teaching a new set of GCSEs, written for its own curriculum, and the family sitting down to a first Year 10 report is looking at qualifications that did not exist when the parents were at school.

What is new, and what is not

The first wave of made-for-Wales GCSEs was taught from September 2025, with a second wave following a year behind. The main summer awards land in 2027, though that date hides something: the unitised courses award sooner. WJEC awards Mathematics and Numeracy for the first time in November 2026. They cover the same ground families recognise, they are set by WJEC as before, and they are graded A* to G, which is the scale Wales has kept while England moved to numbers.

What did change is the shape. Several of the new courses are unitised, which means the qualification is assembled from units that can be sat in different series rather than from one set of papers at the end.

The part parents get wrong

Because of that shape, an exam in Year 10 is not automatically a mock. Units are available in November and summer series, so a paper sat in the summer of Year 10 can be a real, banked result that goes into the final grade.

Families routinely find this out afterwards. A child treats the summer exam as a practice run, revises like it is one, and discovers in Year 11 that the mark is now part of a certificate. The question to ask the school in the autumn of Year 10 is simple and specific: which units are we entered for, in which series, and do those results count towards the final grade?

Resits exist but they are not unlimited. In the maths course a unit may be attempted twice; a third attempt means starting the whole qualification again. There is also a terminal rule, so a share of the assessment has to be taken in the series in which the qualification is finally claimed. Neither of those is a reason to panic. Both are reasons not to treat a first attempt casually.

Maths and tiers

Mathematics and numeracy is a double award: one course, worth two GCSEs. It is entered at foundation or higher tier, and a learner can be entered at different tiers for different units. The tier sets the grades that are available at all, so it is worth understanding which tier your child is on and why, in Year 10, while there is still time for the answer to change.

What Fincho does in Year 10

The plan is built from the actual timetable, the coursework deadlines and the topics that produced mistakes, not from a generic revision schedule. Marked work is read for patterns rather than scores, so three wrong answers caused by one habit come back as one weak spot. Practice questions are written in WJEC’s style and marked against the mark scheme, so a lost mark is named rather than counted.