What AQA is
AQA (the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) is England's largest GCSE awarding body and a registered educational charity. They write the syllabus, set the papers, mark them, and award grades for around 60 GCSE specifications and roughly 50 A-level specifications. They're regulated by Ofqual, the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation.
Subjects AQA dominates
AQA holds the largest entry share for several core subjects. GCSE English Language and Literature is their flagship pair. The Literature paper covers a Shakespeare text, a 19th-century novel, modern prose or drama, and an unseen poetry comparison, with set-text choices varying year to year (Macbeth, A Christmas Carol, An Inspector Calls, and Animal Farm are common pairings).
GCSE History is a broad specification covering medieval, early modern, modern British, and international history, and AQA's source-based questions reward students who can analyse historical evidence in depth. GCSE Religious Studies is AQA-dominant, with the A-specification covering two religions in depth. Most state-school Sociology and Psychology courses use AQA. For the sciences, AQA is the largest provider for both Combined Science and the separate science GCSEs in Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
At A-level, AQA leads in History, Sociology, Psychology, English Literature, Geography, and Business. Maths and the sciences at A-level split more evenly between AQA, Edexcel, and OCR.
AQA paper format conventions
A few conventions recur across AQA papers. The papers tend to weight extended-answer essay questions heavily: English Literature has essay questions worth 30+ marks, and History has source-evaluation and explanation questions worth 16+ marks each. Source-based questioning is common across the essay-led subjects, History and Religious Studies especially, where students engage with a provided text or image and weave analysis through their answers. AQA mark schemes are also transparent about which Assessment Objective each question tests, and tutors familiar with the board coach explicitly to those AO targets.
Past papers and resources
Everything is on aqa.org.uk: past papers (typically 5+ years available per current specification), mark schemes for each paper, examiner reports (the post-exam analysis of how students performed), full specifications for each subject, and sample assessment materials when specifications change.
Examiner reports are particularly underused by parents. They give a clear summary of where most students lose marks and what high-mark answers look like, which helps both revision strategy and tutors structuring their coaching.
Choosing an AQA-specialist tutor
A few things worth asking when you message a tutor about AQA. Which AQA spec code have they taught most recently? (For example, 8300 GCSE Maths, 8700 GCSE English Language, 7042 A-level History.) For text-based subjects like English Literature and History, which set texts have they covered? How do they coach AO-targeted writing for AQA mark schemes, and do they use AQA examiner reports as a coaching tool?