Practise digital GCSE exams in the real AQA and Edexcel interfaces
AQA, Edexcel and OCR onscreen exams arrive from 2026
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A browser-based GCSE exam simulator that mimics the actual onscreen interfaces of AQA, OCR and Pearson Edexcel (text editor, reading panel, navigation, timer, multiple-choice widgets), bundled with subject-specific typing practice using real GCSE-style passages. UK boards are moving from paper to digital from summer 2026, with Pearson Edexcel offering up to 125,000 pupils a digital English option, and AQA's English Language Paper 1 Q1 switching to multiple choice. Generic typing tools (TypingClub, KidzType) and revision platforms (Seneca, Save My Exams, BBC Bitesize) don't replicate the interface or the typing-under-time-pressure of an actual digital exam. This is a Karpathy-style narrow tool, sitting in the gap nobody else is filling.
The Story
Meet the user
Anika is in Year 10 at a comprehensive in Leicester. Her older brother coasted through paper GCSEs two years ago, but her teacher mentioned in passing that her year group might be the first to sit some papers on a screen. Her mum looks it up online, finds news pieces about Pearson's digital pilot, an AQA demo, and a flurry of Mumsnet posts from parents asking the same anxious questions. The school says they'll cover it "in due course". Anika tries Save My Exams (great revision notes, no exam interface), then TypingClub (random sentences about cats, nothing like an exam), then a free typing test (just words per minute on a blank page). None of them practise what she actually needs: tapping out a 400-word essay against a clock, scrolling through a reading extract in a fixed panel, picking the right multiple-choice answer in the new Q1 format.
Then her mum finds a tool that drops her straight into a pixel-accurate clone of the AQA digital paper, with real Paper 1 style passages, the new MCQ Q1, and a typing tracker that scores accuracy and speed against the words-per-minute she'd need to finish in time. £9 a month. She does ten minutes a day for three months and walks into her mock exam knowing exactly which button does what.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
7.7/10
UK revision market is massive (Save My Exams 246k searches/mo, Seneca 90k/mo, touch typing 40k/mo). Distinct niche nobody is filling.
Active parent anxiety on Mumsnet, TES, Student Room. Headteachers publicly warning of the digital-divide widening at GCSE.
Standard web stack, no regulated data, no special APIs. Hardest bit is content curation, not engineering.
Summer 2026 is the first AQA Paper 1 cohort with the new Q1. Pearson is digital-pilot for 125k pupils. Rare "before/after" moment.
Long window: 5+ years of phased rollout to 2030, then evergreen demand for typing practice and interface familiarisation at KS4.
Straightforward to build solo. School B2B adds sales friction, but consumer D2C launch is fast.
Strongest
Timing
The 2026 to 2030 rollout is a once-in-a-generation regulatory shift in UK secondary assessment. Anyone shipping a credible product in the next 12 months gets to define the category.
Watch out
Durability
The risk that exam boards publish polished free demos. Mitigation is to lean into the typing-skill side (which boards won't build) and the cross-board comparison (boards won't promote a competitor's interface).
Pain Point
The problem
“It takes a while to get used to using a computer for exams. They need to be confident and comfortable using the school laptops, as they may be different to their home one, and some functionality like spellchecker and grammar checker may be missing.”
— From the community (Mumsnet, parent thread on digital GCSE typing)
Three pain points stack on top of each other. First, the typing readiness gap. Average handwriting speed is around 25 to 30 wpm. Touch typists hit 70 wpm and beyond. The students who type fluently from home will run away from those who don't, and headteachers (TES, The Star) are publicly warning this widens the disadvantage gap. Parents on Mumsnet are asking what to do about it. There is no current product that combines typing speed practice with subject-specific GCSE prompts.
Second, interface unfamiliarity. AQA, Pearson and OCR each have different onscreen layouts (text editor, fixed reading panel, navigation, bookmarks, MCQ controls). Boards offer thin demo videos and PDFs. Nothing lets a Year 10 do a full timed practice paper inside the actual interface. Pearson's pilot feedback explicitly mentioned software issues, and pupils not having time to acclimatise.
Third, format change anxiety. AQA Paper 1 Q1 changed to multiple choice for summer 2026. The wider rollout reaches more subjects each year. Parents and tutors are searching "AQA digital exams" (30/mo, low competition, growing) and "GCSE 2026 changes" with no obvious destination. Save My Exams and Seneca will get to it eventually but they are not digital-exam-native.
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