When you can resit, and how to enter
GCSE maths is sat twice a year: in November, which is for students who were at least 16 by the previous 31 August (younger only in special circumstances), and in the summer. For November 2026, the JCQ entry deadline was 4 October 2026, and AQA’s papers fall on 4, 6 and 9 November 2026. For summer 2027, the JCQ entry deadline is 21 February 2027, and AQA’s papers fall on 14 May, 27 May and 14 June 2027. Other boards’ dates are close but not identical, so check the board your centre uses.
If you are at a school or college, it enters you. If not, you enter as a private candidate through an exam centre that accepts them. JCQ keeps a search tool for centres but warns that some listed centres may no longer take private candidates, so ring before you plan around one, and ask for its own entry deadline, which can be earlier than the board’s.
Who pays: the rules in England
If you are 16 to 18 and in full-time education with a grade 3, the 16 to 19 condition of funding means your college must have you studying towards GCSE maths, and it pays. With a grade 2 or below you can work towards Functional Skills level 2 instead. From 19, the Adult Skills Fund rules fully fund a GCSE maths course if you have never had a grade 4 or a C, but they will not fund you “to only resit the exam”. These are the 2026 to 2027 rules, checked on 27 October 2026.
Three papers, 240 marks: what a grade 4 took in November 2025
AQA and Pearson Edexcel both set three papers of 80 marks, 90 minutes each, and each counts for a third of the grade. Paper 1 is non-calculator. Foundation tier covers grades 1 to 5 and higher tier grades 4 to 9, with a 3 allowed (AQA specification).
In AQA’s November 2025 series, a grade 4 on foundation needed 158 marks out of 240, about two thirds, and a grade 5 needed 186. On higher, a grade 4 needed 63 out of 240, about a quarter. Boundaries move every series, but the shape holds: on foundation you need most of the marks on a paper you can mostly attempt, and on higher you need a small share of a much harder paper. For a grade 4 or 5, a careful foundation paper is usually the more reliable route.
The national pass rate for resitters is low. In summer 2026, adding up the age rows of JCQ’s post-16 results table for England gives 219,135 GCSE maths entries from people aged 17 or over, of whom 15.3% got a grade 4 or above. The same table splits by age, and the oldest group did best: 32.5% of the 20,539 entrants aged 20 and over reached grade 4, against 16.4% of 17-year-olds. The table does not say why. Sources checked on 27 October 2026.
One foundation question, taken apart
A typical foundation question: share £72 between two people in the ratio 5:3. There are 5 + 3 = 8 parts, so one part is £72 ÷ 8 = £9, and the shares are £45 and £27. Check: 45 + 27 = 72.
The question is filed under ratio, but most of what it tests is older. On our prerequisite map, dividing a quantity in a given ratio sits directly on part-to-whole ratio and simplifying ratios, and on 41 earlier concepts in all, 37 of them from the arithmetic chapter. The marks can go without any misunderstanding of ratio: dividing 72 by 5, adding the parts wrongly, or not managing 72 ÷ 8 without a calculator on paper 1 all lose them. A marked paper tells you a mark went; finding which step lost it means redoing the question one line at a time.
Before the papers: what to revise in what order
Start by finding out which topics are actually missing, across the earlier years as well as the GCSE ones: your last exam paper with its marks, a diagnostic, or a teacher’s gap list all work. Then fix the lowest gaps first, because a repaired step under ratio or fractions makes several topics above it easier at once. Leave full past papers until the last couple of months, and use them to check that the repairs hold under time, marking against the official scheme so you can see where method marks were available. Keep revisiting the topics you fixed first, because a topic repaired months before the exam and not seen again can be gone by the day.
Two cases call for something else. If you were a few marks short of a grade 4 last time, your gaps are probably narrow: start from your own paper and the questions you dropped, not from the foundations. And if you have only a few weeks, there is no time to rebuild: practise exam technique, write out every step so method marks are available, and plan a fuller repair for the following series. If the resit is a step towards sixth form, the A-level readiness check shows what comes next.
