In recent years, “we’ve had an explosion of requests for exam access arrangements”, says Donna Waring, director of special educational needs and disabilities at Endeavour Learning Trust, which runs six primary schools and four secondaries in the North West. Chief among those, she adds, is extra time.

Nicola van Zyl, director of inclusion at St Mark’s Academy in Surrey, part of Anthem Schools Trust, has also seen a significant increase in the number of students who are eligible for extra time.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily that [instances of] extra time have increased [in isolation],” she says, “but that because the number of young people who get a SEND diagnosis has increased, it’s gone hand in hand.”

National data seems to back this up. According to Ofqual, extra time of 25 per cent of the length of the exam (the most common amount) was granted for 16.6 to 25.5 per cent of all students sitting GCSEs, AS levels and A levels in 2024-25. This is broadly in line with the rate of SEND in the student population.

These figures were up on 2023-24, when 14.7 to 20.6 per cent of students were eligible for 25 per cent extra time in their exams. But this comparison is not an exact science.

For one, the figures are presented as a range because of the complexity of the methodology. In addition, it’s difficult to map a definite upward trend over a longer period of time because Ofqual has withdrawn previous data due to inaccuracies.

More requests for extra time in exams

Whatever the specifics, extra time is by far and away the most popular access arrangement, with the second most common - computer reader or reader arrangements - being granted for just 4.8 to 7.7 per cent of students sitting exams in 2024-25.

The purpose of any access arrangement, including extra time, is to make sitting an exam fair for every student.

“So when people think, ‘Oh, it’s giving them a helping hand’ - no,” says Will Goring, assistant principal and Sendco at Landau Forte College Derby, part of Landau Forte Charitable Trust. “It’s setting the playing field level. It’s giving them an opportunity to join in.”

But why is extra time so relied upon, and is it the most effective access arrangement? Or should schools be looking to other options?

Extra time is a “security blanket” to the students granted it, says Jayne Keller, director of education at Education South West, which runs 14 academies in Devon.

While she clarifies that every student has different needs so we cannot say there is one type of learner whom extra time always benefits, it tends to be particularly helpful for students with processing needs, she says.

“Those are the students that need the time, from a cognitive perspective, to take a step back and go, ‘Right, I need to read this more carefully, I need to slow down, I need to work through the language.’”

Extra time is also beneficial for those with social, emotional and mental health needs, Keller adds. This is because “it gives a bit of space for breathing”, lessening their anxiety.

Emma Sumner, senior lecturer in the School of Education at Liverpool John Moores University, concurs, referring to research she has carried out into the impact of extra time, during which students referred to it as a “cushion”.

“They didn’t stress as much because they knew they could take their time,” she says.

This psychological factor is important, suggests Kevin Woods, professor of educational and child psychology at the Manchester Institute of Education. Better exam results are, he explains, often seen as a “more tangible benefit” of extra time than any “self-reported experiential or stress-reduction benefits”.

But, he continues, a more positive exam experience is “likely to increase student engagement with an assessment regime”.

In fact, says Sumner, for students with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia, “we did find an increase in how much they write when they have extra time compared to not, and also the scores were higher generally”.

But, she caveats, that was looking at groups of students. “When we looked at individual variation, it wasn’t the case. Some do better, some do worse. It’s hugely variable.”

And for some students, extra time doesn’t help at all.

“I know young people with ADHD for whom extra time is not the thing,” says Keller. “To get them to sit there for the exam is hard enough, let alone making it longer. ‘Here’s another 20 per cent - crack on,’ isn’t going to be the thing that makes the difference for them.”

She adds that extra time might also not be beneficial for students with physical needs, for example around fine motor skills - “that’s another area where having longer to do [an exam] doesn’t necessarily make it any easier”.

Meanwhile, Catherine Berwick, director of inclusion at Inspiration Trust, which runs 18 academies in East Anglia, points out that for students with executive processing difficulties, which “might mean they’ve got difficulties with focus and paying attention anyway”, extending the length of an exam could cause more stress.

This is particularly the case “if they had a day with two exams, as often happens at GCSE”, she adds. Sumner also observed this in her research, recalling how in some instances, extra time “raised further inequalities” for students, who told her that “by staying in for longer, it really stresses me out. I see my friends leave and I miss break time because I’ve got another exam afterwards”.

In addition, Keller says, extra time will do nothing to help those students who are already struggling with the exam content.

“If they don’t have the knowledge, it doesn’t matter how long you give them to write an answer. They don’t know the answer,” she says.

Data is not collected on the number of students who use the extra time they are granted, and schools have different policies about the extent to which they encourage students to use it, which can bring its own challenges.

“If a student feels pressured to use it when they don’t need it, that can be detrimental to their emotional wellbeing,” Keller says, explaining that this can be in addition to a pre-existing stigma that some students with SEND already feel.

“For some of our vulnerable pupils who already have low self-esteem, yet another way in which they are different can be detrimental as well.”

However, not everyone agrees that this is an issue with extra time.

While Berwick acknowledges that access arrangements such as read-aloud or scribe technology are “seen as something that’s different and makes you stand out”, she “doesn’t get the sense” that’s the same with extra time because it can be managed in a much more discreet way.

The admin burden of extra time

But one issue on which all leaders seem to agree is that the administrative work required to ensure that the students who need extra time receive it can be arduous.

While students with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) are automatically eligible for access arrangements, others “have to be assessed by a level seven-qualified assessor”, says Berwick, explaining that while “we do have some people in our schools who’ve done the training, that’s not true of all our schools, so we have to pay for somebody to come in and do those assessments”.

In Surrey, Van Zyl says her school pays £350 per day for an assessor to come in and test students. “It’s expensive,” she says.

Then, Berwick adds, there is “a significant administrative burden on Sendcos to fill in forms and get evidence from teachers”, alongside the results of the assessment, to send to the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ).

Schools must prove that the access arrangement is a student’s “normal way of working”, Van Zyl says. This means they must plan with plenty of time before exam season, ideally using mocks as part of a student’s evidence package.

There can also be logistical challenges when it comes to exam season itself.

Berwick says that once a student qualifies, extra time is “much easier than other access requirements” to implement - a student can stay sitting where they are, and doesn’t need any additional staffing or equipment, for example.

Woods adds that “extra time is ‘low risk’ in respect of the integrity of the examination as there is no teacher intervention”.

In addition, “it is a relatively low resource cost to the school as once it’s provided to one student, it can be provided to many others in the same exam without proportionate increases in resourcing”.

However, Berwick says that there are practical considerations for schools when it comes to scheduling, especially for mock exams, where “the temptation is to squeeze more into a shorter period of time to reduce the amount of lost learning time. But if you have three exams in one day, for example, you’d have to be really careful to make sure that those children who had extra time were still able to have sufficient breaks”.

This is a concern that Goring in Derby shares, describing “how compressed the exam windows can be between a morning and afternoon exam”. Given that many students eligible for extra time might be more vulnerable to exam stress and anxiety, this must be managed carefully. “We have to balance that,” he says.

Meanwhile, Waring adds that while extra time alone is not the most challenging arrangement to organise, exam logistics more generally are getting “tricky when the numbers [of children with SEND] are increasing”. A higher number of students requiring different arrangements means “we are having to really think carefully about how we are laying out the exams”, she explains.

“There is a cost implication for schools,” she continues, because if more students require arrangements that mean they must be in separate rooms, “we need to recruit more invigilators and train them up and make sure they’re aware of all the JCQ regulations”.

All in all, “I do think it’s extremely time-consuming for Sendcos and inclusion teams,” Waring says, especially since guidelines and thresholds regularly change.

Yet despite the challenges, leaders will, of course, ensure that students have what they need to succeed. “If extra time is right for the child to enable them to access the exam the same way their peers would, then we absolutely make sure everything’s in place,” Waring says.

With all this in mind, should extra time continue to be the most popular access arrangement, or might other options help students more?

Alternative exam access arrangements

There are numerous other kinds of access arrangements available, should a school be able to evidence that it is a student’s usual way of working.

For example, Keller describes students “who do their examinations in smaller rooms away from the big hall settings”, and those who use coloured overlays - although the use of these materials has been called into question by research.

Meanwhile, at Inspiration Trust, Berwick says she has recently “really tried to push” the use of assistive technologies such as read-aloud technology, whereby a student hears the questions read aloud via headphones.

This requires a set-up including electronic exam papers and software, but in some ways is “much easier to implement [than extra time] because the threshold isn’t as high, you don’t need an external assessor”, she says.

In addition, some students are granted permission to listen to white noise to aid concentration, and, says Goring, if you argue the case to JCQ, “you can even have an animal in the room”.

Increasingly, he says, there is a move towards supervised rest breaks, with JCQ stipulating that schools consider this arrangement before applying for extra time.

Goring speculates that this is “in response to an increase in children having approval for extra time”.

However, a JCQ spokesperson tells Tes that “the guidance is there to help ensure that candidates receive the right access arrangement” and is “separate to and has no connection with the data on the number of access arrangements”.

Woods points out that one advantage of rest breaks over extra time is that they are centre-delegated.

They “don’t need to be applied for to the exam board, so are probably less time-consuming to administer”.

“We always try rest breaks,” says Keller in Devon. “For some students, a rest break is what they need. It’s about the longevity of their concentration - but that doesn’t require extra time. It means stopping, going somewhere else, doing something else, and then coming back.”

Van Zyl adds that rest breaks can be more beneficial for students with cognition learning needs, as well as those with ADHD, for whom “being in a silent room for a very long period of time is really challenging”. Having the opportunity to step outside and regulate their emotions, “just to feel safe”, can allow them to better concentrate on their return.

But a rest break alone isn’t ideal for every student. Sometimes a rest break is most useful in combination with extra time, says Berwick. For example, for a student with “focus and attention difficulties - so you zone in and out and have to read things three or four times to make sense of it - rest breaks don’t solve that. You might need rest breaks as well, but you also need extra time for all that additional processing”.

What’s more, says Woods, “the implementation of rest periods potentially requires the movement of a student out of the exam hall whilst the exam is in session, and the additional invigilation of the student during transit and within the rest period setting” - making it potentially more logistically challenging.

The domination of extra time as the most-granted access arrangement also seems at odds with the curriculum and assessment review’s recommendation for overall GCSE exam time to be reduced by at least 10 per cent, begging the question: should we be making exams shorter or longer?

For Berwick, “the two things go hand in hand”. “If we are working in a high-stakes, single-assessment-point system, then what makes that accessible to every student has become increasingly important.”

“If the system were different and accountability for assessment was different, do I think that there might be a lesser need [for extra time]? Yes.”

But the current set-up of our exam system means “we’re going to need to continue to support our students who are most vulnerable to achieve as best they can in that one-shot, high-stakes week”, she adds - which might involve them having extra time.

Meanwhile, says Woods, “if the standard time spent in examinations reduces, then I would predict a proportionate reduction in time that a student spends in extra time”.

“However, I wouldn’t predict that this would reduce the number of applications made for allowance of extra time,” he adds.

After all, says Keller, extra time is granted to ensure that “everyone starts at the same place, to make it as fair as we can” - which, by its very nature, means some students will always require something different to their peers.

As such, whether schools opt for extra time, rest breaks or another access arrangement, that choice “has to be based around every individual student and what’s going to make a difference to them”, Keller says. “Everyone needs something different.”

Ellen Peirson-Hagger is a freelance writer