Access Arrangements As a Private Candidate

Yes. Access arrangements are available to private candidates on the same regulatory basis as to any other candidate, under the JCQ Access Arrangements and Reasonable Adjustments regulations.

What differs is the practical difficulty of evidencing a normal way of working when you are not attending a school, which is why JCQ publishes a separate overview of the process for centres accepting private candidates.

It means the way you actually work day to day, with extra time, with a word processor, with rest breaks, evidenced over a period rather than asserted.

It matters because the regulations require an arrangement to reflect established practice, not just a diagnosis. An arrangement that appears for the first time in the exam room is not a reasonable adjustment; it is a change of conditions.

Evidence of need from an appropriately qualified professional, in the form the JCQ regulations specify, together with the centre's record of your normal way of working.

The precise requirements differ by arrangement and are set out in the regulations, which are republished annually. Read the current version rather than an older one.

No. The application is made by the centre entering you, through the awarding body systems. Candidates cannot apply directly, in the same way they cannot make their own exam entries.

This is why the choice of centre matters. A centre must be willing to do this work for a candidate it may not teach.

No. Access arrangements are applied for per series, by the centre entering you, and do not travel with you automatically.

Your school history is extremely useful evidence, so obtain the record from the school, what was granted, on what evidence, and for how long, and give it to the new centre early.

Yes, but you need both parts: evidence of need and an established normal way of working. Neither can be manufactured quickly.

If this is your position, enrol early and work with the arrangement from the start of the course, so that by the application deadline the practice is real and documented.

At the beginning of the course, not near the entry deadline. Assessments by specialists have waiting lists, and normal way of working takes months to establish.

Applications for a summer series have published awarding body deadlines, and modified papers have earlier ones again.

Supervised rest breaks, a reader or computer reader, a scribe or speech recognition technology, a word processor, separate invigilation, prompters, coloured overlays and modified papers, among others.

The JCQ regulations set out the full range together with the qualifying criteria and evidence requirements for each.

Evidence of need must come from an appropriately qualified professional in the form the regulations require, and privately obtained assessments can meet that standard where the assessor and the report are appropriate.

Check the current requirements before you commission anything. A report that does not meet the specification is an expensive document that cannot be used.

Medical conditions can support arrangements such as rest breaks or separate invigilation, on the same evidence basis.

A temporary injury shortly before or during the exams is usually handled differently, through special consideration or a temporary arrangement, and must be reported to the centre immediately rather than after the paper.

£125 as an administration charge, applied once per candidate per series whatever the number of subjects.

That does not include an assessment by a specialist assessor or educational psychologist where new evidence is required. Those are separate professional costs that we neither charge nor mark up.

The centre will tell you why, and in many cases the reason is a gap in the evidence rather than a refusal in principle, which may be fixable for a later series.

If the arrangement is not in place, you sit under standard conditions. That is a hard outcome, and it is the reason the process should start in the autumn rather than the spring.