Applications are open for September 2026!聽馃殌
Applications are open for September 2026!聽馃殌
At 糖心APP, a key part of the advanced journey in Grades 11 and 12 is the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ). The EPQ is a year-long project where learners research, create, and build something meaningful around a topic that genuinely interests them.
The EPQ helps learners take their project development and management skills to the next level. It helps learners further develop the skills they built through the termly challenge projects in Grades 9 and 10. The EPQ involves a single sustained project completed over the course of a full year, allowing learners to explore ideas in greater depth and develop greater mastery.
As an approved Edexcel centre, we embed the EPQ into our challenge-based learning model. Each year, learners select a global challenge theme, such as Building Sustainable Futures or Ethical Technology, and choose a specific challenge within that theme to explore through their project, giving learners the flexibility to design interdisciplinary projects connected to real-world issues.
The EPQ empowers learners to design, research, and execute a year-long project on a topic that truly fascinates them. Whether tackling a pressing ethical dilemma, exploring technological innovation, or creating an original artistic work, learners gain hands-on experience in research, critical thinking, project management, and communication. The journey unfolds across three terms, each with a distinct focus.
The EPQ journey is structured over the year around the Challenge Based Learning (CBL) framework’s three phases:
Term 1: Engage & Investigate phase
Learners begin by immersing themselves in a global challenge theme. Challenges like Building Sustainable Futures and Ethical Technology are intentionally broad. Building Sustainable Futures, for instance, spans planetary boundaries, systems thinking, and sustainable economics, while also developing inner capacity and resilience. This breadth gives learners the space to find what genuinely interests them before narrowing their focus.
From there, learners:
Term 2: Act phase
With their research foundation in place, learners move into the act phase where they develop and implement their solutions. During this time, they also receive mentorship from industry experts aligned to their topic and project type.
From this point, learner journeys diverge and become even more personalized depending on the type of project they have chosen 鈥 with all roads leading to presenting their final projects at the Global Showcase.
Term 3: Share & Reflect phase
In Term 3, learners enter the Share & Reflect phase. Projects are presented at a global showcase, giving learners the opportunity to share their work with a global audience at the Global showcase. Alongside this, learners complete a project review cycle where they reflect on their experience, what went well, and what they would approach differently next time. It is this final phase that brings the full arc of the EPQ together: from a question, to a tangible solution, to celebration.
At the advanced levels in Grades 11 and 12, learners work toward credits within the Human Literacies Framework 鈥 defined areas of learning, each with learning outcomes that learners work toward. With 30+ advanced credits to choose from, ranging from Advanced Biological Sciences to Mind & Behaviour to Venture & Product Building, learners plan at the start of the year which areas they want to explore.
EPQ work contributes directly to this. Projects often count toward the Advanced Written Communication credit, where learners develop academic writing and research skills through inquiry. Depending on the nature of their project, learners can evidence a range of their chosen credits through their EPQ work, with credits spanning science, design, social inquiry, and more. Alongside their EPQ, learners complete skill units across their chosen credits, which in turn support their project development helping them build the knowledge and technical skills needed to bring their ideas to life.
Beyond knowledge in their chosen areas, learners receive additional support through targeted workshops tailored to their projects that cover everything from literature reviews and argument structuring to product design, UI/UX, ethical research methods, statistical analysis, scripting, storyboarding, and prototyping.
The EPQ at 糖心APP is an opportunity to explore, experiment, and expand. It equips learners with the independence, confidence, and transferable skills they need for higher education and beyond, all while allowing them to pursue projects that are personally meaningful and socially relevant.
The EPQ develops skills that universities and employers value: independent research, critical thinking, time management, project management and effective communication. It carries up to 28 UCAS points, helping learners stand out in competitive university applications.
Our learners have been tackling real-world challenges with creativity and rigor through their EPQ projects.
馃弳 In 2025, 75% of our learners received either an A or A* grade in their EPQ.
Dissertation: Elliana鈥檚 Project
Elliana explored gender biases and stereotypes in primary education.
She began by building a robust literature review, critically analysing sources to identify key themes, tensions, and gaps that helped her uncover how teacher interactions, academic materials, and classroom literature contribute to differing outcomes for girls and boys.
From this, she established her central argument: that gender biases and stereotypes within the education system itself significantly reinforce learning inequalities between students. Her counter-argument examined the external factors such as culture, parental influence, and peer dynamics that also shape these outcomes, ensuring her discussion was balanced and credible.
Throughout the year, Elliana logged her development process at each stage, documenting decisions, reflections, and feedback received at multiple checkpoints to create a polished dissertation.
Investigative Study: Katie-Grace鈥檚 Project
Katie-Grace explored the link between teens’ empathy and their behaviour toward others at school.
Driven by a personal belief in the need for greater kindness in society, she began by reviewing existing research on empathy and prosocial behaviour to build the foundation for her own investigation.
Setting out to investigate whether teens with higher empathy levels would be more likely to intervene in instances of rudeness, she designed an original experiment where participants were observed responding to escalating rude behaviour in a group discussion.
From there, she made considered decisions about methodology, participant selection, and data collection instruments, all while ensuring her research was conducted ethically.
She learned how to conduct textual analysis and interpreted her data in relation to existing literature, acknowledged her study’s limitations, and used them to propose meaningful directions for future research.
Performance: Keoni鈥檚 and Alia鈥檚 Projects
Keoni created a short film exploring how to achieve fulfilment and happiness.
He began by building a literature review that drew on philosophy, psychology, and film, developing his ability to critically engage with diverse sources and synthesise them into a coherent creative direction.
From this research foundation, he developed his concept: a film that challenges the idea of happiness as something to be chased, and instead presents it as something to be created from within.
From there, Keoni moved into pre-production, creating mood boards, building a production schedule, and going through multiple rounds of scripting before arriving at his final narrative. This iterative process developed his skills in creative decision-making and project planning, learning to refine an idea rather than settle for the first version of it.
During production, Keoni made deliberate choices around composition, lighting, and direction. He drew on film references from his literature review to inform his visual style.
During post-production, he worked through editing, colour grading, and sound design, and sought feedback from an experienced film professional to refine his final cut.
Performance projects can take many forms. Any live, audience-facing experience qualifies, and Alia’s project is a great example of that.
Alia organized an in-person event in her local community examining what drives sustainable community action and civic engagement.
Motivated by a personal frustration with feeling powerless in the face of climate change, she began by building a literature review that examined grassroots movements, community resilience, and the role of inner transformation in leadership whilst developing her ability to engage critically with interdisciplinary research before shaping her project vision.
From her research, Alia identified that community resilience is built not just through knowledge and resources, but through connection, collaboration, and shared values. This became the foundation for her project: organising a one-day hybrid event called 鈥淪ustainability Confest鈥 that brought together farmers, activists, researchers, and storytellers to share ideas and inspire local action in North Wales.
What followed was a masterclass in real-world project management. Alia secured funding through a combination of institutional donation and a crowdfunding campaign, collaborated with local organisations for venue and logistics, designed a bilingual marketing strategy, coordinated a volunteer team, and curated a full programme of panel discussions, workshops, and live music.
Every decision, from sliding-scale ticket pricing to sustainable catering, was grounded in the values her research had identified as essential to inclusive community engagement.
After the event, she gathered feedback through surveys and evaluated her outcomes honestly against her original goals, acknowledging limitations and identifying what she would do differently for her next event!
Artefact: Brielle鈥檚 Project
Brielle explored sustainable furniture design by tackling one of modern urban living’s most practical challenges: how to make the most of limited space without compromising on environmental responsibility.
She began by building a literature review that examined the history of furniture design, existing space-saving solutions, and sustainable materials before shaping her own design direction.
From her research, Brielle identified bamboo, cork, recycled steel, and tempered recycled glass as her materials of choice, grounding each decision in evidence about sustainability, durability, and cost.
She then moved into ideation producing multiple rounds of perspective sketches, refining her drawings through tutorials, and developing a detailed design brief before arriving at a final concept: an expandable dining table that folds out from a compact cabinet, with integrated storage for both chairs and crockery.
Brielle chose to build a physical mini prototype first to test her expansion mechanism, then moved to a full-scale cardboard model.
She conducted load and user testing, incorporating feedback into her refinements. She also used AI prompt engineering to visualize her final design across multiple perspectives before committing to construction.
The EPQ is, at its core, an exercise in intellectual honesty. Learners choose a question they don’t yet have the answer to, spend a year genuinely grappling with it, and produce something that reflects the depth of that process.
These projects reflect personalized exploration, interdisciplinary learning, and meaningful impact, but by the time our learners complete their EPQ, they have navigated ambiguity, revised their thinking, and learned to defend their ideas 鈥 skills that translate directly into university and beyond.
The projects featured here are a snapshot of what that looks like in practice. Each one began with a question and ended with something real 鈥 a film, a prototype, a dissertation, a study. And each one tells us something about what becomes possible when learners are given the space and the trust to pursue what genuinely interests them.
