About Past Paper Hub

How this started

A student in Sri Lanka was preparing for her O Levels, and losing a third of every evening to the same thing: hunting for papers. One site had the paper, another had the mark scheme, a promising link opened the wrong session. The work was not the problem. Finding it was.

So her mother started keeping them — properly named, mark scheme beside each one, so nothing had to be found twice. She shared the folder with her friends, her friends shared it with theirs, and it kept going.

That folder is this site. The student it was built for now runs it, and it holds 2,862 papers across 24 subjects — but it is still doing the one thing it was made to do. Find the paper, start working.

What you will find here

Everything is organised the way a student looks for it — by subject, then by sitting, then by unit — rather than the way an archive would file it.

• 1,440 question papers and 1,422 mark schemes, covering 457 exam sittings from 2009–2026, for both the current and the previous specifications
• Every mark scheme beside its paper, on the same page. A past paper without its mark scheme teaches you very little, because you cannot see where the marks actually went
• A grade boundary calculator that uses the real published boundaries, so a raw mark can be read as a grade
• Exam timetables for the coming sittings, and a countdown to the next one
• Printable planners and trackers, and a free study dashboard for students who want to keep track of what they have done
• A board for passing on books — so that folders and textbooks from students who have finished reach the year below instead of a bin

No account is needed to read or download anything. There is no limit on how many papers you take, no watermark, and no page that makes you wait before the download appears.

Why it is free, and how it stays free

Past papers are published by an exam board for students to learn from. Charging a student to reach something that is already meant for them would be the exact opposite of why this site exists. So the papers are free, and they will stay free — not as an introductory offer, but permanently.

Running it is not free, though. There is hosting, storage for several gigabytes of files, a domain, and the hours spent adding each new sitting and checking that what went up is the right paper. Three things cover that: modest advertising, a small printing service for students who want notes printed and bound, and an optional subscription for extra study tools. None of them touch the papers.

If you never click an advertisement, never order anything and never subscribe, the site works for you exactly as it does for everyone else. That is the deal, and we would rather earn less than make it conditional.

Where the papers come from

Papers are gathered from Edexcel’s publicly released materials. Each file is checked before it goes up — that it opens, that it is the paper it claims to be, and that the sitting it is filed under is the sitting it was actually sat in. That last check matters more than it sounds: mark schemes are published months after the exam and carry the publication date, which is how papers end up filed under the wrong session on other sites.

Filenames are decoded so every paper carries its subject code, unit, session and year, and the paper reference printed on the front of the booklet is shown alongside. That is how the search can find a paper from a code like 4PH1/1P in a second or two, which is how most students arrive — they know exactly which paper they want.

Sharing, and not wasting

When a student finishes their exams, their textbooks, folders and printed papers stop being useful to them overnight. To someone two years below, the same pile is worth a great deal. Most of it is thrown away.

That is why Clear your clutter exists: a free board where a student who has finished can offer what they no longer need, and a student who needs it can get in touch directly. Nothing is sold, and we take no part in the handover beyond checking each listing before it appears. It costs nothing to use and it keeps good material in circulation rather than in a landfill.

Who it is for

It was built in Sri Lanka, and a good share of the students using it are here. But Edexcel qualifications are sat in well over a hundred countries, and the problem it solves — a specific paper, needed now, hard to find — is the same everywhere. There is no regional restriction, no sign-up wall and nothing that asks where you are. A student in Colombo, Lagos, Karachi or Dubai sees exactly the same site.

Teachers use it too, more than we expected. Setting a mock means finding a paper a class has not already worked through, which is precisely what a deep archive is good for.

Things we will not do

• Put papers behind a sign-up. No email address, no account, no “share to unlock”
• Make you wait. No countdown before a download, no redirects through other sites
• Ask you to click an advertisement. Ever, for any reason
• Sell your details. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is collected and why
• Pretend the papers are ours. They are Pearson’s, and we say so on every relevant page

Getting in touch

If a paper is missing, a link is broken, or something is filed under the wrong session, telling us is genuinely useful — most gaps are filled within a few days, and several thousand of the files here exist because a student wrote in to say they could not find something. Contact us and the message reaches a person, not a queue.