3rd Oct 2025

The New AQA Psychology Specification: What’s Changed and How Up Learn Helps

AQA’s 2025 new A Level Psychology specification will bring some important changes. Our expert content team has already reviewed the updates in detail and refreshed the entire Up Learn course, so students and teachers can feel fully supported and confident from the very start.

This blog gives you:

• A clear overview of what has changed (and why)
  
• What it means in practice for psychology students and teachers
  
• How Up Learn has updated our courses to make sure your students don’t miss a beat

What’s Changing and Why?

AQA’s revisions to psychology have been shaped by three key priorities:

1. Improving clarity

The new specification has been streamlined to remove vague or overlapping requirements. For example, in the Approaches topic, students previously had to cover both “the influence of genes” and the “genetic basis of behaviour.” These are now merged into a single, clearer concept, making it easier for students to know exactly what they need to learn, and for teachers to plan lessons with confidence.

2. Reducing the volume of content

Psychology A-Level is famously demanding. Students must recall vast amounts of theory, evidence, and critical perspectives, and then demonstrate extended written analysis under exam pressure. Based on teacher feedback, AQA has eased the load slightly by removing some theorists, studies, and concepts from the specification.

For students, this means more time to focus on mastering the core material. For schools, it means more manageable lesson planning. And for Up Learn, it means that our revised psychology module now contains 75 fewer lessons without compromising the quality or depth of understanding.

(We’ll miss a few of our favourite experiments though… including the famous hamster suprachiasmatic nucleus transplant!)

3. Updating terminology

AQA has also worked to modernise the language in the specification. This is particularly noticeable in Clinical Psychology and Gender, where more inclusive and up-to-date terminology is now used. Students will benefit not only from clearer definitions, but also from being taught with sensitivity to evolving psychological understanding.

Up Learn’s Response

One of the advantages of being an online revision platform, rather than a traditional textbook publisher, is agility. Where textbooks require entirely new editions (and new purchases), we can update our courses quickly and comprehensively, ensuring students and teachers always have the most accurate materials at their fingertips.

We’ve done this before. For example:

• In Economics, specifications were updated following the Brexit referendum, and we refreshed our content accordingly.
  
• In Biology, we incorporated changes to OCR’s specification in 2023.
  
• In 2022, when exam boards released “advanced information” for COVID-disrupted cohorts, we made rapid adjustments so our students could focus their revision on the right material.
  

The new AQA Psychology specification, however, has been our biggest update project yet. Because our courses are deeply interconnected (we design them to build cross-topic connections so students can consolidate and apply their learning flexibly), we couldn’t just update the highlighted changes in isolation. We reviewed the entire course, ensuring that updated terminology, concepts, and emphasis were reflected consistently.

In summary:

• Around 90 videos have been updated across the course.
  
• Papers 1 and 2 are already fully aligned with the 2025 specification.
  
• Our brand-new Paper 3 topics (Relationships and Forensic Psychology) are fully up to date.
  
• Remaining Paper 3 content (including the extensively revised Gender topic) will be refreshed and released in time for the 2026–27 academic year.

What This Means for Teachers, Students, and Parents

For teachers: you can be confident that your students using Up Learn are working from the best and most accurate and specification-aligned online resources available. Our lessons are already adapted, so you don’t have to spend hours re-planning.

For students: less content, more clarity, and Up Learn’s proven teaching methods mean you’ll be able to master the new specification more efficiently and with higher chances of hitting those top grades.

For parents: it means reassurance. Even when exam boards shift the goalposts, your child won’t lose out, but they’ll be learning from content written, reviewed, and updated by experts who know the specification inside out.

Final Thoughts

The 2025 AQA A level Psychology specification marks the most significant change in years. For students, it brings greater clarity and a slightly lighter workload. For teachers, it offers a more focused, teachable syllabus. And for us at Up Learn, it has been an opportunity to show the depth of our expertise, the quality of our content, and our commitment to staying ahead of the curve.

As ever, we’ll continue to monitor feedback from schools, students, and AQA itself and make further refinements whenever needed. After all, our mission is simple: to deliver the most effective path to each learner’s target outcome. Accessible to every learner, across every curriculum.

Find out more

For Teachers & Schools

Want to see how our updated Psychology course could support your students?

👉Book a quick call with our team.

For Students & Parents

Looking for the best support with the new Psychology specification?

👉Explore our AQA Psychology course or book a quick call