The General Certificate of Secondary Education or GCSE is a subject-based academic qualification that students in the UK take at the end of their compulsory education in Year 11 (age 16). They are typically studied over a period of 2 or 3 years, starting in Year 9 or 10 depending on the subject, exam board or school, and are completed by a series of exams at the end of the course.
IGCSE was designed in 1988, 2 years after GCSE, to be more suitable for students studying in an international or non-UK context. The ‘I’ in IGCSE stands for ‘International’.
IGCSE is recognized as the international equivalent of GCSE.
Both GCSEs and IGCSEs will influence a student’s future plans and are preparatory to A Levels or IB (Year 12 and Year 13).
Do schools offer both GCSEs and IGCEs? It depends on where you are in the world!
In the UK, it is technically possible for both state and private schools to offer GCSE and IGCSE qualifications. However, IGCSEs are becoming less and less common in state schools as the UK Government stopped including IGCSE results in national performance data (i.e. league tables) in 2014, which ranks state schools according to academic achievement in nationally standardized exams (i.e. SATs, GCSEs and A Level). In response to this, most state schools have returned to offering GCSEs only.