uk-exam-paper-scraper

Download AQA, Edexcel/Pearson, and OCR A-Level and GCSE past papers and mark schemes from official sources — no browser required.

Disclaimer: Past paper PDFs are copyright of their respective exam boards. This tool is for personal educational use only. Ensure your use complies with each board's terms of service before redistributing downloaded files.

Installation

pip install uk-exam-paper-scraper

Requires Python 3.9+.

Quick Start

# AQA — download all configured specs
paper-scraper --board aqa

# Edexcel — build a metadata index (no download by default)
paper-scraper --board edexcel --all

# OCR — scrape a single spec
paper-scraper --board ocr --spec-code H240

Usage

AQA

paper-scraper --board aqa [--spec-code CODE] [--dry-run]

Flag	Description
--spec-code CODE	Scrape a single spec (e.g. 7357 for A-level Maths). Defaults to all configured specs.
--dry-run	List discovered papers without downloading anything.

AQA papers are downloaded by default. Files are saved under paper_scraper/papers/{spec_code}/{year}/{series}/.

Example — preview A-level Physics papers:

paper-scraper --board aqa --spec-code 7408 --dry-run

Edexcel / Pearson

paper-scraper --board edexcel [--spec-code CODE] [--all] [--dry-run] [--download]

Flag	Description
--spec-code CODE	Scrape a single spec (e.g. 9MA0 for A-level Maths).
--all	Explicitly scrape all configured specs.
--dry-run	List discovered papers without writing anything.
--download	Download PDFs (default behaviour is to build the metadata index only).

Example — download GCSE Maths papers:

paper-scraper --board edexcel --spec-code 1MA1 --download

OCR

paper-scraper --board ocr [--spec-code CODE] [--all] [--dry-run] [--download]

Flag	Description
--spec-code CODE	Scrape a single spec (e.g. H240 for A-level Maths A).
--all	Explicitly scrape all configured specs.
--dry-run	List discovered papers without writing anything.
--download	Download PDFs (default behaviour is to build the metadata index only).

Example — index all OCR specs without downloading:

paper-scraper --board ocr --all

Output

PDF files

paper_scraper/papers/
  {spec_code}/
    {year}/
      {series}/
        AQA-73671-QP-JUN23.pdf
        AQA-73671-MS-JUN23.pdf
        ...

Metadata index (JSON)

Each board writes a JSON index file:

Board	File
AQA	paper_scraper/index.json
Edexcel	paper_scraper/edexcel_index.json
OCR	paper_scraper/ocr_index.json

Each entry contains:

{
  "content_id": "sample-papers-and-mark-schemes.2023.june.AQA-73671-QP-JUN23_PDF",
  "spec_code": "7357",
  "subject": "A-level Mathematics",
  "year": 2023,
  "series": "june",
  "paper_type": "QP",
  "paper_number": "1",
  "paper_name": "Pure",
  "tier": null,
  "filename": "AQA-73671-QP-JUN23.pdf",
  "local_path": "paper_scraper/papers/7357/2023/june/AQA-73671-QP-JUN23.pdf",
  "source_url": "https://www.aqa.org.uk/files/...",
  "file_size_kb": 412.5,
  "scraped_at": "2025-06-01T10:00:00+00:00"
}

paper_type is one of: QP (question paper) or MS (mark scheme).

Supported Specifications

AQA

Covers all major A-level and GCSE subjects, including:

• Sciences: Biology (7402), Chemistry (7405), Physics (7408), Combined Science (8464/8465)
• Maths: Mathematics (7357), Further Mathematics (7367), GCSE Mathematics (8300)
• Humanities: History (7042), Geography (7037), English Literature A/B (7712/7717)
• Languages: French (7652), German (7662), Spanish (7692), and more
• Other: Psychology (7182), Sociology (7192), Computer Science (7517), Economics (7136), and many more

Run paper-scraper --board aqa --dry-run to see the full list.

Edexcel / Pearson

Covers major A-level and GCSE subjects, including:

• Sciences: Biology A/B (9BI0/9BN0), Chemistry (9CH0), Physics (9PH0), GCSE sciences (1BI0, 1CH0, 1PH0, 1SC0)
• Maths: Mathematics (9MA0), Further Mathematics (9FM0), GCSE Mathematics (1MA1)
• Humanities: History (9HI0), Geography (9GE0), Economics A/B (9EC0/9EB0)
• Languages: French (9FR0), German (9GN0), Spanish (9SP0), Russian (9RU0), Chinese (9CN0)
• Other: Psychology (9PS0), Business (9BS0), Politics (9PL0), and more

OCR

Covers major A-level and GCSE subjects, including:

• Maths: Mathematics A (H240), Mathematics B MEI (H640), Further Mathematics A/B (H245/H645)
• Sciences: Biology A/B (H420/H422), Chemistry A/B (H432/H433), Physics A/B (H556/H557)
• Humanities: History A (H505), Geography (H481), Economics (H460), Religious Studies (H573)
• GCSE sciences: Gateway Science (J247–J250), Twenty First Century Science (J257–J260)
• Other: Computer Science (H446), Psychology (H567), Sociology (H580), and more

How It Works

Each board has an undocumented but public API. Here is a brief documentation of each but please do NOT hammer their servers.

AQA

AQA's past-papers page is powered by a JSON search API:

GET https://www.aqa.org.uk/api/search
    ?type=aqaResource
    &scope=findPastPapers
    &specCode={code}
    &page={n}
    &limit=100
    ...

The response contains a results array and a hits total. The scraper paginates until all results are collected. Each result's contentId field encodes the year, exam series, and filename in dot-separated segments (e.g. sample-papers-and-mark-schemes.2023.june.AQA-73671-QP-JUN23_PDF). The download URL is constructed as https://www.aqa.org.uk/files/{contentId}.

Edexcel / Pearson

Pearson's qualifications site is backed by Algolia. The scraper POSTs directly to the Algolia query endpoint using a public read-only API key embedded in the site's JavaScript:

POST https://l639t95u5a-dsn.algolia.net/1/indexes/qualifications-uk_LIVE_master-content/query
{
  "params": "query=&filters=category:\"Pearson-UK:Specification-Code/{algolia_code}\"&hitsPerPage=1000"
}

Each Algolia hit carries a structured category taxonomy with fields for document type (Pearson-UK:Document-Type/Question-paper), exam series (Pearson-UK:Exam-Series/June-2023), and unit/paper number (Pearson-UK:Unit/Paper-1H). The tier (Higher/Foundation) is encoded as a suffix on the unit value.

The complication is that Algolia's taxonomy codes don't match the published spec codes: for example, both 9MA0 (A-level Maths) and 9FM0 (Further Maths) share the Algolia code maths-2017-as-al, and are distinguished by filename prefix. These mappings have to be discovered manually — see Adding New Edexcel Specs below.

OCR

OCR's site uses two jQuery AJAX endpoints:

Step 1 — confirm available qualification levels:

POST https://www.ocr.org.uk/resource/getlevels/
Body: qualification={qualification_value}

Returns a JSON list of available level strings (e.g. "A Level", "AS Level").

Step 2 — fetch resource HTML for that level:

POST https://www.ocr.org.uk/resource/filterresourcesbysubject/
Body: qualification={value}&level={level}&resourcetypes[0]=Past+papers&...

Returns an HTML fragment (can take ~10 seconds) containing an accordion-style list of all past paper links for that qualification. The scraper parses this with BeautifulSoup, extracting PDF links, titles, unit codes, and file sizes from the nested h4/ul.resource-list structure.

The qualification_value is OCR's internal numeric ID for a subject (e.g. 308647 for Maths A), which is unrelated to the published spec code (H240). These are hard-coded in ocr_config.SPECS.

Adding New Edexcel Specs

Edexcel's site is backed by Algolia. Each spec requires an internal Algolia code that isn't published. Use the bundled discovery script to find codes for specs not already in the config:

python -m paper_scraper._find_algolia_codes

Edit SEARCHES at the top of that file to add the spec codes you want to look up. It prints the Algolia taxonomy code for each one, which you can then add to edexcel_config.SPECS.

Rate Limiting

The scrapers include built-in delays between requests (1–1.5 s between pages, 1 s between downloads) to avoid hammering exam board servers. Please do not reduce these.

Dependencies

• requests — HTTP requests
• beautifulsoup4 — HTML parsing (OCR scraper)