OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects (9697): Complete Subject Guide

What OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects actually is

Picture two very different Saturday mornings. On one, you are alone at the kitchen table with a stack of library books and a half-finished spreadsheet, trying to work out why your chosen question matters and how you are going to answer it in the words you have left. On the other, you are crammed into a corner of the common room with three classmates, a roll of flip-chart paper and a genuinely awkward disagreement about whose idea for reducing plastic waste in the canteen is actually going to work. Both of those mornings are OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects. This is a qualification built entirely around doing real work rather than sitting a written exam, and that single fact changes almost everything about how you should prepare for it.

OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects (subject code 9697) is assessed through non-exam assessment only. There is no timed paper, no exam hall, and no last-minute cramming session the night before a written exam. Instead, your grade comes from two pieces of extended, supervised work: an individual project that you choose and steer yourself, and a group sustainability action project that you build with at least one other student. Together, those two pieces of work carry different weightings within the final mark, and the individual project on its own tends to carry the larger share, with the group sustainability action project weighted at 40% of the qualification. That split roughly mirrors the guided learning hours OxfordAQA recommends for each component, so it is worth knowing early rather than discovering it in the final week.

This OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects specification page exists to give you one clear picture of the qualification before you commit a term of Saturday mornings to it. Whenever you need the OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects syllabus in full, or a fast OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects study guide before a supervision meeting, or a topic-by-topic OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects topics breakdown, or an explanation of how OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects grade boundaries are likely to work for a non-exam qualification, or a set of OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects revision notes to keep beside your project folder, this is the place to start.

Who this subject actually suits

Global Skills Projects was written for students who learn best by doing something rather than being told about it, in the same way some people learn to cook by following a recipe once and then improvising forever after. If you already enjoy organising things, whether that is a school club, a family event, or your own revision timetable, you have a head start. If you find a completely open brief a bit daunting, that is normal too, and the taught skills sections of the specification exist precisely to give you the scaffolding a blank page usually removes.

The IGCSE 9697 course was developed with subject specialists and teachers who wanted a genuinely useful alternative to a purely written exam. It sits alongside subjects like OxfordAQA IGCSE Business Studies or OxfordAQA IGCSE Geography rather than replacing them, and many students take it precisely because it rewards project management, research, and communication skills that a traditional exam paper cannot easily test. The OxfordAQA Global Skills Projects course was built around four broad aims: planning and completing real projects, using evidence critically, solving problems and working with others, and reflecting honestly on your own performance. Every mark you earn eventually traces back to one of those four aims.

The two components, side by side

It helps to see the two halves of the course next to each other before you start either one, because they share several skills but ask for them in different settings.

Notice that a group sustainability action project cannot legally be a group of one. If your class ends up with an odd number of students, or someone withdraws late, the centre has to pair the remaining student with a non-assessed partner rather than let them submit alone. That rule exists because collaboration is being assessed directly, not just the end product, so a solo submission would not be testing the same thing.

Individual project: what you actually build

The individual project asks you to pick a topic, an area, and a working title, then to write your own aims, objectives, and word limit before you do any real research. That sounds bureaucratic written down like that, but in practice it is closer to writing a short contract with yourself, and it stops you drifting halfway through into a project that has quietly become a different project. From there, the taught skills cover research (both secondary sources like books, journals and the internet, and where appropriate primary research you gather yourself), report writing in an appropriate voice and structure, presentation and oral communication, and a final stage of reflection on your own creative thinking and decision making.

A useful analogy is planning a long journey with no satnav. You would not set off without deciding roughly where you are going, checking what resources you will need along the way, building in checkpoints to see if you are still on course, and thinking about what could go wrong. The individual project asks for exactly that kind of thinking, formalised as project planning and management, resource identification, monitoring progress, and risk assessment, before it ever asks you to write a full report.

Group sustainability action project: what you actually build

The group half of the course asks a team of students to identify a sustainability issue, at a local, national or global level, and to design and carry out an action in response to it. The syllabus is explicit that sustainability covers three overlapping strands: economic sustainability (things like stable growth, fair distribution of wealth and responsible use of resources), environmental sustainability (conservation, carbon emissions, ecosystem management), and social sustainability (equality, education and well-being). A strong project usually touches more than one of those strands, because real sustainability problems rarely sit neatly inside a single category.

You will also be expected to understand the background to current debates about sustainability, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and to be able to explain why some approaches to sustainability succeed in one context and fail in another. Collaboration is assessed as its own skill here, not as an afterthought, so a group that documents how it split roles, resolved disagreements, and adjusted its plan when something did not work will usually outperform a group that simply produced a polished poster with no visible evidence of teamwork.

Skills that run through both projects

Four skill areas turn up in both halves of the course, which is good news, because getting better at any one of them pays off twice.

• Research skills. Finding and evaluating suitable sources, understanding the ethics of research (especially if you interview real people), using a formally acknowledged referencing system consistently, avoiding plagiarism, and building a proper bibliography rather than a rushed list of links.
• Report writing. Structuring a report with a real introduction and conclusion, choosing a writing style, voice and frame that suits the reader, understanding the difference between simply narrating what you did and evaluating whether it worked, and proofreading against a word limit rather than treating the limit as a suggestion.
• Presentation and oral communication. Meeting the actual requirements of an oral presentation and knowing the elements that separate a presentation people remember from one they politely forget.
• Reflection. Critically evaluating your own performance, the skills you picked up, and your presentation evidence, rather than writing a generic "I learned a lot" paragraph at the end.

A realistic study timeline

Because this is entirely non-exam assessment, revision in the traditional sense matters less than pacing. The biggest risk is not forgetting content the week before an exam, it is running out of runway on a project you can no longer meaningfully improve. A workable rhythm across a two-term window looks like this.

1. Weeks 1 to 3: Learn the taught skills for the individual project (planning, research, report writing) and settle on a working title, aims and objectives.
2. Weeks 4 to 8: Carry out research, log sources as you go rather than at the end, and start drafting sections of the report rather than waiting for a "final" draft moment.
3. Weeks 9 to 10: Finish the report, proofread against the word limit, and prepare the oral presentation.
4. Weeks 11 to 14: Move into the group sustainability action project: form groups, choose a sustainability issue, and agree roles.
5. Weeks 15 to 18: Carry out the action, collect evidence of the process (not just the finished output), and write up individual and group reflection.

Build in a checkpoint roughly every two weeks where you show a supervisor what you have so far. Waiting until something feels "finished" before showing anyone is the single most common way students lose time they cannot get back on a project qualification.

How grading works without a written exam

Because there is no written exam, it is natural to ask how a mark is actually reached. Both components are marked against published assessment criteria that reward the quality of the process as much as the quality of the final product: evidence of planning, evidence of research and its evaluation, the quality of the written report, the quality of the oral presentation, and the quality of your reflection. Centres apply those criteria and OxfordAQA moderates a sample, in the same way coursework and other non-exam assessment has always been checked in other IGCSE subjects. When people ask about OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects grade boundaries, what they usually mean is how the overall mark from both components converts into a final grade, and that conversion is set after moderation each series rather than fixed in advance, exactly as it is for other non-exam qualifications.

Common early mistakes worth avoiding from day one

Students who have not done a project qualification before tend to make the same handful of errors early. Choosing a topic that is too broad to research properly in the time available is the most frequent one. A close second is leaving referencing until the final week, which turns an ongoing habit into a frantic hunt through browser history. A third is treating the oral presentation as an afterthought, when in fact rehearsing it out loud, in front of another person, is one of the fastest ways to spot gaps in your own reasoning before a supervisor does.

Where to go next on the platform

Once you have this overview in place, the most useful next steps are the two topic-specific guides on this platform: one that goes deep on the individual project, covering project planning, research skills, report writing, presentation, and reflection in full, and one that goes deep on the group sustainability action project, covering sustainability concepts, local-to-global sustainability challenges, and the collaboration skills that get assessed alongside the finished action. Read this OxfordAQA IGCSE Global Skills Projects specification page once at the start of the course to understand the shape of the whole thing, then return to the two deep-dive guides as you actually start each component, and keep the article on common mistakes nearby as a final check before you submit. Bookmark this global skills projects OxfordAQA specification overview now, because you will want it again the week you start writing your working title.