For most people, AQA is synonymous with GCSEs and A Levels, processing 3.6 million GCSE, AS and A Level entries each year from 1.1 million students.
But lately, England’s biggest awarding bodies have been making headlines for all the wrong reasons; looming strikes at AQA, controversy over executive bonuses at City & Guilds, and a rebuke from Ofqual over exam breaches at Pearson.
Former teacher, Ofsted deputy director and self-confessed policy nerd Anna Trethewey wants to shift that narrative. She is leading AQA’s most significant strategic shift in years: expanding beyond its academic heartland into technical education, apprenticeships and adult skills.
AQA has “huge ambitions” to deliver the first wave of V Levels and new level 2 qualifications, and is eyeing future T Level contracts.
For an organisation with a reputation built on academic examinations, it is a bold move. But Trethewey insists it is an obvious one.
“Hand on heart, we’re a big education charity. We have the resources and the social commitment. Why wouldn’t we be working with young people and adults across education?”
A vocational vocation
This will not be its first venture into vocational qualifications; an attempt over a decade earlier was a “damp squib” because AQA still spoke “academic language”, Trethewey says.
This time feels different.
In 2022, AQA acquired Training Qualifications UK (TQUK), an awarding and end-point assessment organisation which works with around 120 colleges.
“We’re known for our scale and trusted for our credibility,” Trethewey says. “But TQUK really understands the FE sector and wider adult skills landscape.”
The partnership is gathering momentum. TQUK recorded 173,000 registrations in 2025-26, with registrations increasing by 21 per cent in the first quarter of this academic year, and it enjoyed its strongest ever spring.
Construction EPA Company joined the group in 2025, shortly followed by the major apprenticeships and adult skills training provider Realise.
Anna Trethewey at Realise training centre in Cleckheaton
Squiggly career
Trethewey understands how life-changing adult education can be, as her own mother left school with just two O Levels and returned to education in her 50s to retrain as a counsellor.
Mother and daughter would “sit there grumbling together” over their essays while Trethewey studied for her A Levels.
While her mum taught her about “the power of second chances”, her father was head of learning technology at the local Bromley College, championing online learning years before digital education became fashionable.
Performing arts was the hook that kept Trethewey engaged at school, and she is proud that AQA continues to offer loss-making qualifications such as GCSE dance which might otherwise disappear.
Last year, 63 of AQA’s 114 qualifications operated at a loss, creating an £8.2 million deficit.
“That’s the right thing to do,” she says. “Nobody else will offer some of them, and it’s critical young people continue to have access to those qualifications.”
Trethewey still somehow resembles a rock musician (she used to sing in a band called Starry Smooth Hounds) with her distinctively edgy style.
She speaks about education with the calm assurance of someone who has viewed it from many angles in her “squiggly” career; teacher, researcher, think tank director and Ofsted deputy director.
Yet a common thread exists: trying to understand why some young people flourish while others quietly fall behind.
Her LinkedIn background is not the standard corporate image but shows her accompanied by young people from AQA’s student advisory group that she chaired.
Anna Trethewey singing as part o Starry Smoot Hounds band
Teach First
Trethewey was a poetic practice master’s student at Royal Holloway when she landed a poet-in-residence placement at a primary school in Slough.
That led her to the Teach First programme, which placed her in a secondary school in Lewisham where fewer than one in ten pupils achieved five good GCSEs.
Like many trainee teachers, Trethewey arrived believing education could solve almost anything.
“I was idealistic – you throw your heart and soul into it.”
The reality proved more complicated. She quickly realised schools could not compensate for problems beyond their gates.
But there were victories. One pupil, newly arrived from overseas, barely spoke despite being “incredibly bright”.
After almost three years of patiently building trust, he agreed to read to her during a library lesson.
“It was quite profound,” she says. “He decided he trusted me enough to use his voice.”
Trethewey helped establish a sixth form with a particularly vocational flavour. It began with a small sports qualification, which “gave young people a pathway they weren’t going to get otherwise”.
More importantly, it kept young people in an environment where they felt safe.
“They didn’t always have that in their wider lives.”
Anna Trethewey with her former band Starry Smooth Hounds
Answering the burning questions
Trethewey later moved to the City of Norwich School, where she was made deputy head of English, before leaving the school sector to join education researcher Loic Menzies as the first full-time employee at his fledgling think tank, LKMco.
She was partly driven by a sense of injustice.
Ofsted’s then chief inspector Michael Wilshaw had described some teachers as “lazy”, suggesting they “do not know what stress is”, but Trethewey felt that curriculum reforms had caused teachers’ workload to “grow and grow” during her seven years in teaching.
These days she is a “voice of caution around the AQA table”, warning about the pitfalls of the “change load coming onto schools and colleges”.
The move set her on an exciting career journey, but Trethewey admits that even now she misses pupil “banter”.
LKMco (later rebranded The Centre for Education and Youth (CFeY) and closed last year due to funding constraints) had no political patrons or large institutional backers. Everything depended on securing individual research commissions.
“We punched above our weight,” she says.
This independence gave it “freedom” to pursue awkward questions without worrying whether it aligned neatly with political agendas.
“We didn’t have a board that would push us in a particular direction, or say, ‘could you not look at that? It’s politically awkward for me’.”
Among the think tank’s most influential work was its research into teacher recruitment and retention, as Trethewey tried to answer the workforce questions that had frustrated her as a teacher.
She thought that staff incentives should be wider than “golden handcuffs”.
Her husband benefits from working at a London primary school that offers free childcare to the children of staff, which Trethewey believes “drives loyalty”.
Her research around flexible working, workload reduction and childcare support later appeared in the government’s teacher recruitment and retention strategy.
“You don’t always know where the breadcrumbs will lead,” she reflects.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills.
More ties
Trethewey then joined Ofsted on secondment in a strategy role, intending to later move into “a grown-up corporate job”.
Instead, she stayed at Ofsted for over two years and later returned as deputy director with responsibilities covering SEND, alternative provision and local area partnerships.
There were “a lot more ties” being worn in Ofsted meetings than she was used to, but beneath the boardroom formalities she discovered an organisation wrestling with many of the same dilemmas that policymakers, school leaders and colleges face every day.
SEND was “a really hard, fraught space”, she says.
And one children’s services director told her they almost wished inspectors would simply judge their area ‘inadequate’ to strengthen their case for additional funding.
The conversation “resonated” with Trethewey.
She was troubled by rising numbers of children educated in unregulated alternative provision beyond the reach of Ofsted inspection, with some operating without proper fire escapes, qualified teachers or adequate safeguarding arrangements.
“Some local authorities’ safeguarding audits of those wider alternative provisions are brilliant, some are thinner,” she adds.
While welcoming recent legislation giving Ofsted stronger powers to investigate illegal schools, Trethewey worries that significant loopholes remain.
Tackling the “corners of education where the most vulnerable are often hidden” is “critical for any government… but it goes down the to-do list when there’s so much going on”.
No afterthoughts
Trethewey is now preparing for AQA’s biggest transformation in its 123-year history.
V Levels, and new level 2 foundation certificates and occupational certificates are due to arrive from September 2027.
The timetable for these new qualifications “feels punchy,” but “deliverable”.
But she hopes level 2 foundation certificates and occupational certificates will not become an “afterthought”.
“If we don’t get the design right because we’re rushing, they risk undermining the very purpose we’re trying to achieve,” she says.
Pearson currently holds 16 of the 20 T Level licences, but future procurement rounds will be an open market.
“Watch this space,” Trethewey says. “If it’s in the best interests of learners and we think we can do something of quality, why wouldn’t we?”
AQA is not short of potential cash to expand; it has over £88 million of free reserves.
Trethewey believes there is also a “real need” to look at introducing more vocational pathways for 14 to 16-year-olds, which incoming prime minister Andy Burnham reportedly has his eye on.
“If you wait till 16, you might have lost them along the way,” she says.
She worries that while new qualifications may enable young people to keep their career options open, apprenticeships are in short supply and higher technical routes are “patchy”.
“It becomes a difficult conversation with young people if we’ve told them we’re keeping every door open when, actually, some of those doors aren’t there”.
Eye on AI
Meanwhile, AI poses a growing threat to the integrity of qualifications.
Two years ago, AQA broke new legal ground by securing injunctions against social media influencers promoting exam cheating online.
AQA is “always looking for ways to clamp down” on them, but Trethewey takes a pragmatic view that “there will always be bad actors looking to make a fast buck”.
The scourge of AI-generated coursework has strengthened her belief in the value of supervised assessment.
Yet AI also presents opportunities.
AQA has been trialling AI systems capable of identifying unusual marking patterns across live GCSE papers. Where anomalies are detected, senior examiners review the scripts before any decision is made.
Trethewey is emphatic that humans remain responsible for every final mark.
Elsewhere, AQA is experimenting with technology that improves the legibility of handwritten scripts and streamlines burdensome administrative tasks, such as ordering new certificates.
This “low-hanging fruit” is where AI’s immediate value lies.
“But if you lose confidence in public examinations, you’ve lost everything,” she says.
Devolution drama
Trethewey also sees potential in devolution. Realise already works closely with several mayoral combined authorities, delivering programmes ranging from bus driver training to smart energy skills.
Burnham may allow qualifications to be shaped at a regional level, and this week Reform UK’s education spokesperson Suella Braverman said their “skills revolution” would have “regional dedicated qualifications at their heart”.
But Trethewey does not believe that qualification content should be decided regionally; “it is right that there are national benchmarks, and my certificate here in London means the same thing as your certificate in Redcar”.
She would like to see the “moratorium” that has been in place on new adult skills qualifications since 2020 overturned, because “we need to inject energy in that space”.
But she fears a “race to the bottom” as the government launches new programmes tackling NEET numbers.
Realise has an adult skills centre near Bradford, where the community had previously become sceptical of providers delivering “one-off courses and leaving”.
“How do we stitch together something genuinely sustainable, rather than just chasing the latest funding pot?” Trethewey asks.
“It’s so important [these providers] stay and get the trust of the community… as AQA moves into this space, we’re only doing it if we can do it properly.”
Trethewey sees her role leading AQA’s vocational expansion as “a bloody privilege”.
If she succeeds, the organisation best known to GCSE and A Level learners may soon become just as familiar to colleges, adult learners and apprentices.
She claims AQA has no need to abandon its charitable status to achieve its goals.
“I’m not having to run for short-term profits – that’s a really privileged place to be in”.