Subject Access Request to AQA

AQA asks you to make a subject access request through the online form on its subject access requests page. The form opens by asking you to choose a category before anything else — a candidate looking for a past result, an associate, an employee, erasure, amendment, or contacting them on behalf of someone else. AQA's two pages give different timescales: the request page says it aims to process valid requests within 30 working days, while its privacy notice says it will always try to respond within one month. Thirty working days is the longer of the two and longer than the calendar month the law allows, so treat the month as your entitlement and AQA's figure as what it expects to take. It also says records older than 2002 take longer, and that pre-1996 records have to be fetched from physical archives. If what you want is proof of your grades, work out which route you need before you pay for the wrong one. AQA charges an administration fee of £50.25 for a certified statement of past results covering two exam series, takes up to 20 working days plus postage, and sends hard copies only — and it says it cannot confirm whether it holds your results until after you have applied and paid. A subject access request carries no fee unless AQA judges it unfounded or excessive, and it does tell you whether AQA holds anything about you. What it will not produce is a certified statement, and GOV.UK is clear that there is no replacement certificate for an O level, CSE, GCSE or A level — the certified statement is the only substitute, and it is the document a university or employer will accept. A subject access request is the one route here you can use on your own. AQA states that it cannot accept post-results services such as reviews of marking or appeals from students, parents or guardians, and that all post-results requests must come from your school or college unless you are a private candidate. So a request will not stand in for a review your centre declines to enter: it can show you the marks and the marking record, but nothing about it can change a grade. Copies of marked papers are free, and they are not a subject access request. AQA's post-results services list both a priority copy and a standard copy of a marked paper at no charge, ordered through your centre and only up to a published deadline for each series — for the June 2026 series, 3 September 2026 for a GCSE priority copy and 30 October 2026 for a standard copy. Copies already issued are cleared from Centre Services each April. Miss those windows and the right of access will not fill the gap, because your own exam answers are among the things a request cannot reach. AQA's privacy notice nonetheless lists exam scripts among what you can ask for, so it is worth asking — just do not plan around it. Check the board before you ask. AQA says it can only confirm results for exams taken with it or its predecessor boards, and it names those on its page for CSE exams taken between 1965 and 1987, NEAB, AEB and SEG among them. For everything else it publishes a table of which board holds which older qualification, including OCR, Pearson Edexcel, WJEC, CCEA and SQA. Oxford International AQA Examinations is a separate company registered at Oxford University Press with its own data protection contact, so a qualification taken under that name is not this route. AQA's data protection mailbox is gdprenquiries@aqa.org.uk, and its privacy notice, last updated May 2026, offers that address both to people who wish to exercise their rights and to people making a data protection complaint. It is not listed above as a place to send a request because AQA's own request page scopes it more narrowly, to questions and to discussing a request you have already made, and because the same address doubles as a complaints route. A request made in writing is valid however you send it; the form is simply the route AQA describes and processes. Two different complaints go two different ways. A complaint about how AQA handled the request — ignored, late, or answered incompletely — goes to AQA and then to the Information Commissioner, and what to do when an organisation does not comply sets out the steps. If you have had a reply and cannot tell whether it is complete, our free response checker will show you what is missing. A complaint about the exam service or about a grade goes through AQA's complaints process, which promises a full response within 10 working days, and then to Ofqual as its regulator. Ofqual does not handle data protection complaints and the Commissioner does not review grades. The postal address above is AQA Education's registered office, which AQA publishes in its site footer. It is not a data protection submission address — none of AQA's data protection or contact pages publishes one — and the online form is the route it describes. It is here because a written request is valid whatever a controller prefers, and because it is the only route on this page for someone who cannot use the form. AQA states its own ICO registration number, Z6944888, in its privacy notice, and the register entry confirms it against AQA Education and its former exam-board names. Two smaller things AQA publishes. It keeps the request itself on its systems for two years and then deletes it, so keep your own copy of anything you are sent. And a request about someone who has died is not a subject access request at all, because data protection rights end at death; AQA's data protection pages set out no route for a deceased candidate's records, so its certificate services team is the place to ask rather than the request form.

Made under UK GDPR Article 15, subject to the examination exemptions in Schedule 2, Part 4 of the Data Protection Act 2018

An exam board holds your entries, candidate number, marks, moderation and appeal records, and its correspondence with your school or college about you. A university or college holds all of that plus your student record, admissions file, misconduct and fitness-to-practise files. Requests usually arise from a disputed grade, an appeal, a misconduct allegation, or simply needing a record of results from years ago.

Your exam answers are treated differently in law. Under paragraph 25 of Schedule 2, Part 4 of the Data Protection Act 2018, the right of access does not apply to information recorded by candidates during an exam — so, as the ICO puts it, candidates do not have the right to copies of their answers to the exam questions. What the marker recorded is a different matter: the ICO's guide to the exemptions states that information recorded by the person marking the exam is not exempt, so marks and examiners' comments are within scope even though the script itself is not.

There is a timing rule for marks, and it is narrower than it is often described. It applies only where you ask before the results are announced. In that case the organisation must answer within five months of the request, or within 40 days of the results being announced if that comes sooner. Ask after results day and the ordinary deadline applies in full, as set out below.

• Marks, moderation records and examiners' comments
• Entry records, candidate numbers and the results held against your name
• Appeal, review-of-marking and malpractice records
• The full student record and admissions file, at a university or college
• Emails about you between staff, or between the organisation and your school

Deadline. An organisation must respond without undue delay and within one month. It may extend by up to two further months where the request is complex or you have made a number of requests, but it must tell you within the first month that it is doing so, and why.

Cost. There is normally no fee. A reasonable fee may only be charged where a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive, or where you ask for further copies.

Proving who you are. An organisation may ask you to verify your identity, but only where it has reasonable doubts about who you are, and it should ask for the minimum needed. Where it needs further information to deal with your request, the one-month clock pauses until you provide it.

How hard they have to look. An organisation has to carry out a reasonable and proportionate search — not an exhaustive one. What counts as reasonable depends on the volume of information, the difficulty of locating it, and the size and resources of the organisation. This is a common reason for a partial response, and it is worth being specific about what you want.

If they ignore you. Complain to the organisation first. Since 19 June 2026 every organisation has had a legal duty to give you a clear way to raise a data protection complaint, to acknowledge it within 30 days, to look into it properly and to tell you the outcome. If it does not, or the answer is incomplete, you can then complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.