CCEA GCSE Geography (512) Past Papers 2026

Physical Geography — River Environments, Coastal Environments, Changing Weather and Climate, The Restless Earth

Duration: 1h 30m

Human Geography — Population and Migration, Changing Urban Areas, Contrasts in World Development, Managing our Environment

Duration: 1h 30m

Geographical Enquiry — Planning, Data Collection, Presentation, Analysis and Evaluation

Duration: 1h

Sustainability — understanding, applying, and threading it through extended answers

The single most persistent weakness across all three years. Examiners in 2023, 2024, and 2025 all stated that candidates failed to use the word 'sustainable' throughout answers, confined it to a single final sentence, or omitted it entirely. Good candidates addressed sustainability specifically for each method in river and coastal management strategies.

Unit 1, Unit 2

Evaluate command — distinguishing it from describe and explain, and including a judgement

Flagged in the Subject Overview of all three years. The 2024 report stated explicitly that 'evaluate is not clearly understood as requiring a discussion of both positive and negative aspects and the necessity to include a concluding judgement'. Many candidates who understood evaluate still omitted the final judgement sentence, preventing Level 3.

Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3

Longshore drift — describing sediment transport not just zig-zag movement

In 2023, most candidates recognised the process of Longshore Drift but many wrote generally about a zig-zag movement describing swash and backwash without referring to sediment/sand being transported/moved along the beach. This error was specifically cited in Theme B.

Unit 1

Weather and climate — anticyclones, depressions, and the cold front

Identified as consistently weak across all three years. In 2023, candidates explained weather across the whole depression rather than just at the cold front. In 2024, the characteristics of a winter anticyclone were poorly answered. In 2025, many candidates thought a summer anticyclone had rising air, which cascaded into errors about wind direction and fog.

Unit 1

The Restless Earth — confusing focus/epicentre, precautions vs. responses, and outdated case studies

In 2023, many candidates muddled focus and epicentre, or seismograph and Richter scale. In 2024 and 2025, candidates used the outdated 1995 Kobe earthquake case study or wrote about preparations instead of responses (or vice versa). The question in 2024 required evaluation of preparations before an earthquake, but many described impacts or responses instead.

Unit 1

Fieldwork Unit 3 — evaluating reliability of conclusions (the hardest question each year)

In all three years, the evaluation of reliability of conclusions was described as the most challenging question on the paper. Candidates regularly wrote about data collection methods instead, or described the data, rather than assessing whether their conclusions were reliable and how reliability could have been improved.

Unit 3

Development — using country names not continental names, and explaining the mechanism of globalisation

In 2024 and 2025, many candidates referred to 'Africa' as a country, restricting marks to Level 1. In 2024, candidates who did not explain how globalisation occurred (TNCs, foreign investment, lifting of trade barriers) earned only Level 1 regardless of how well they discussed the effects. In 2025, candidates generally did not use case study material to show how globalisation helped a BRICS country.

Unit 2

Fieldwork hypothesis and data table preparation — too many hypotheses and over-complex tables

Across all three years, examiners consistently flagged centres submitting more than two hypotheses (up to five were seen in 2025) and tables too complex for candidates to draw graphs from. In 2023, one examiner stated there was no way a candidate could produce a decent graph from some tables. Five sites minimum are required; some centres provided too many (14 sites were seen in 2025).

Unit 3