The whole test runs 7–9 minutes at Foundation tier and 10–12 minutes at Higher, and speaking is worth 25% of the GCSE. The order is fixed — read aloud, then role play, then picture task — and it is the same structure, timings and mark scheme as Edexcel French; only the language changes. Before the test starts you get 15 minutes of supervised preparation with the read-aloud text, the role-play card and the picture card in front of you: 14 minutes in a preparation room and a final minute in the exam room where you may practise the read-aloud text out loud. You can make notes on one A4 sheet and annotate the text to help your pronunciation, and you can refer to those notes during the exam. You cannot use a dictionary at any point.

The exam opens with a short Spanish text on a card — 35–40 words in five sentences at Foundation, 50–55 words in four sentences at Higher — that you read aloud to your teacher. Reading it well is worth 8 marks and is judged on clear, understandable pronunciation: the sound-to-spelling rules of Spanish rather than a perfect accent. Spanish is kinder than French here because almost every letter is sounded, but the usual slips are still there: the silent h, j and the soft g, ll and ñ, and stress on the wrong syllable, especially where a written accent tells you otherwise. Because the text is on your card during preparation, you can mark it up and read from your marked copy.

Then come two short questions, worth 4 marks, which are not on your card. They are in the present tense and ask for likes, dislikes or opinions loosely connected to the text's topic — ¿Te gusta el deporte?, not a comprehension test. Your teacher can repeat a question twice but cannot rephrase it. A short, relevant answer with a reason scores; silence does not. Practise reading Spanish aloud for a few minutes a day, then say one opinion about whatever you just read.

You get a card with a setting and five bullet points in English, each of which needs one utterance from you. Edexcel role plays are always transactional — buying tickets, ordering food, booking a room, reporting a problem — and always in one of a fixed list of settings: café or restaurant, shop or market, hotel, train station, tourist information office, cinema or theatre, campsite, leisure centre, doctor's surgery or hospital, or simply "in town". Your teacher opens with a short introduction, asks the first question, and then plays the other person.

At Foundation you must ask one question; at Higher you ask two, and one of your answers has to be in a future timeframe. Otherwise the present tense is expected, plus a familiar conditional where it is natural — quisiera or me gustaría. The settings are formal, but the specification is explicit that you are not required to use the formal register, so tú or usted both score. The role play is marked on communication only: each bullet is scored 0, 1 or 2 for whether the message got across, and a one-word answer can only earn 1. So the rule is simple — say a whole sentence for every bullet, even a plain one, and always get your question in.

More than half the marks — 28 of 50 — sit here, in three phases. First, your card shows two colour pictures on a thematic context you chose in advance from a choice of two, and you pick one to describe. The teacher asks which picture you have chosen and then says Describe la foto. Your description must cover three things — the people, the place and what is happening — and can go as far as you can take it; if you miss one, the teacher may prompt you, at most three times each. The description is worth 12 marks, for what you convey and how accurately you say it. This is where the Spanish present continuous earns its keep — están comiendo, está jugando — which the Foundation specification already expects.

Second, the teacher asks two compulsory questions about your own experiences and opinions linked to the picture, worth 4 marks; at Higher the second is in a past tense, so have your preterite ready — fui, comí, lo pasé bien. Third, the conversation — 16 marks, and the longest stretch of the exam, about 3 minutes at Foundation and 5 minutes at Higher. The teacher must begin with a starter subject printed on their card, then follow where you lead. There are suggested questions in the present, past and future, but they are not compulsory, so the conversation is genuinely open. Opinions with reasons, past and future references, and answers of more than one sentence are what turn into marks here.

Your teacher conducts and records the exam and Pearson marks the recording. Of the 50 marks, 26 are for communication — getting your message across and responding to what you hear — 8 are for the picture description itself, and 20 are for the quality of your language: vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Read aloud is 8 for the reading and 4 for the questions; the role play is 10, communication only; the picture task is 12 for the description, 4 for the compulsory questions and 16 for the conversation. The practical consequence: the role play rewards completing every bullet, while the picture description and conversation are where range and accuracy of language are actually scored — so that is where your best Spanish should go.

Foundation tier targets grades 1–5 and Higher tier 4–9, and Spanish asks a little more grammar than French at both tiers. At Foundation, Edexcel Spanish already expects the preterite, the present continuous, and the singular forms of the inflectional future and conditional — iré, me gustaría — alongside voy a + infinitive. At Higher, the future and conditional in all persons and the present subjunctive of five verbs in the singular — haga, sea, vaya, venga, tenga, as in cuando tenga tiempo — are the structures that move you up the bands. Nobody expects native-speaker Spanish; the standard is what a well-prepared 16-year-old can do.

Speaking is the one paper you cannot revise from a book — you have to actually speak, ideally to something that responds. Three things work: practise the role-play settings with a classmate using the fixed list above, so ordering food or booking a room in Spanish becomes automatic; record yourself describing a photo for two minutes and listen back; and use an AI examiner that runs the tasks in Edexcel's order and asks the follow-up questions you cannot see.

Our app, Tête-à-Tête AI, runs the full Edexcel speaking exam — read aloud, role play and picture task, timed, with preparation time — and gives you six examiner-style scores plus an indicative grade at the end. The scenarios are written in-house to Edexcel's published format, set in Edexcel's transactional settings and covering the six thematic contexts, and they are pitched at GCSE level. The first 7 practice sessions every 30 days are free, no card required.