A-Level Persian in England is a Pearson Edexcel qualification, specification 9PN0, Issue 1, June 2018, first assessed in May/June 2020. Its full title is Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Persian (listening, reading and writing), and that parenthesis is the single most important structural fact about the course: there is no speaking paper. Speaking survives only in the aims, where the specification says students should develop speaking skills as part of their courses of study although there will be no assessment of those skills. Every mark in the qualification is earned by listening, reading, translating and writing. This is a different qualification from the Edexcel languages that do have a speaking paper, and different again from the AQA modern-language A-Levels, so folklore attached to either is unreliable here. There are three externally examined papers, all taken in the same May/June series. Paper 1, Translation into English, reading comprehension and writing (research question) in Persian, runs for two hours thirty minutes, carries 80 marks and is worth 40 per cent: Section A is an unseen translation from Persian into English for 20 marks, Section B is reading for 20 marks over four questions, and Section C is the research question for 40 marks, in which the student reads an unseen Persian text and responds to a statement about their own researched subject in a recommended 300 to 350 words of Persian. Section C alone is a fifth of the whole A-Level and is the largest single task in the qualification. Paper 2, Translation into Persian and written response to works, runs for two hours forty minutes, carries 110 marks and is worth 30 per cent: Section A is an unseen translation from English into Persian for 20 marks, and Sections B and C carry two extended essays of 45 marks each, either two on literary texts or one on a literary text and one on a film. Two films is not permitted. Paper 3, Listening, reading and writing in Persian, runs for two hours fifteen minutes, carries 60 marks and is worth 30 per cent: Section A is listening comprehension for 30 marks with individual control of the recording, and Section B is a 30-mark question in which the student summarises one heard source and one read source on the same sub-theme and then evaluates the viewpoints in both, writing a recommended 200 to 250 words. The language of assessment is Persian throughout, with exactly one exception: the Paper 1 Section A translation requires a response in English. The content is four themes, each broken into two sub-themes and a research subject, and each of those divided into aspects; the specification prints all of them in Persian. The scoping rule matters more here than in most of this family: Themes 1, 3 and 4 are set in the context of Iran only, while Theme 2 is set in the context of Iran and Afghanistan, and a student researching Theme 2 must still choose one of the two countries and write about that one alone. Theme 1 covers changes in contemporary society, carried by a family sub-theme and an education sub-theme, with work opportunities for young people as its research subject. Theme 2 covers media and culture, carried by music and by festivals and traditions, with the development of social and online media as its research subject, which is why the specification describes this theme as covering artistic culture and political culture together. Theme 3 covers the condition and the varied aspects of Persian-speaking society, carried by participation in environmental questions and by tourism and its effect on society, with women's expectations in society as its research subject. Theme 4 covers political and artistic influences on society past and present, carried by the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988 and by changing attitudes to art, with aspects of contemporary Iranian art as its research subject; that pairing means one artistic sub-theme sits inside what the frozen topic scheme calls political life, and these notes say so where it happens. The assessment objectives are weighted AO1 20 per cent (Paper 3 alone), AO2 30 per cent, AO3 30 per cent and AO4 20 per cent, and both AO1 and AO3 are written-only in this family: understand and respond in writing to spoken language, and manipulate the language accurately in written forms. Everything in these notes is scoped to that specification. Explanations are in English, the Persian is authentic, glossed and written in standard modern Persian orthography, and the exam technique is written against the real tasks rather than against a generic language-A-Level.

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