The GCHQ National Language Competition - Frequently Asked Questions

Registration for the NLC 2025 opens on Friday, 26 September and will remain open until the end of the competition on Friday, 21 November.

Teachers/home education representatives can register their interest to receive updates by emailing [email protected]. 

In terms of quantity of teams, there is no limit. We would, however, encourage you to advertise the opportunity and only make teams for the students that are planning to actively compete. Individual teams can have up to four participants.

The NLC 2025 will run from 17th to 21st November. During the week of the 17th November, each team will have access to the platform between 07:00-22:00 Monday-Thursday and 07:00-18:00 on the Friday, and can compete whenever they find the time.

New for this year is a time limit allocated to each team to use how they wish across the week during platform opening times. This has been introduced to level the playing field between schools that are able to dedicate more time to the competition and those that aren't. 

Teams from around the UK will compete against each other to solve language-based challenges and score points. The NLC challenges vary in difficulty and are worth different numbers of points accordingly.

A key part of the NLC is that it requires no previous language skills – our aim is to inspire language learning by encouraging students to discover their aptitude for learning languages. For example, many of the challenges involve rarer languages or made-up languages so students can get involved even if they have never studied a foreign language before.

This year, we have introduced a new format and more easy challenges to improve accessibility.

All that is required is a device (computer, laptop, tablet etc.) and connection to the internet to take part. Access to the wider internet is permitted as part of the competition. We would recommend you ensure your device is updated to the latest version of internet browser and operating software, and that your school system does not block JavaScript, to ensure the competition experience is as smooth as possible for your students.

There is no requirement for students to be studying the same language or have any previous language experience.

Yes! There is no charge to students or schools.

We welcome home educated participation (of eligible age). We simply ask for an adult to act as a representative for each team participating.

Our aim is to make the NLC as simple as possible. As a teacher/adult representative, you will need to:

• look out for any email updates from the NLC mailbox.
• create an account on our platform when registration becomes live.
• advertise the NLC to your students.
• create teams for them on the NLC platform.
• facilitate contact between your students and the NLC team if the students have any questions.

The NLC team are on hand to help via the NLC mailbox ([email protected]) during the hours of 8am-5pm Monday to Friday. These hours are extended to align with platform opening times during competition week. If there’s anything we can do to support you or your school, then please do get in touch.

The NLC is a national competition aimed at Yr9 (England/Wales), Yr10 (NI), S2 (Scotland) students. We hope this competition will enthuse students about language learning in time to inform their GCSE (or equivalent) option choices.

You’ll notice a few changes to the NLC platform this year. We have new colours and a different format for the questions, moving away from the capture-the-flag style used in previous years, to make the competition more interactive.

Based on feedback, we’ve introduced a team time limit to ensure a degree of fairness among competitors. This means that each team of up to four will have a time allocation of 25 hours to be used across the week as they wish (during platform opening times).

Taking into consideration any students who would usually qualify for extra time in formal exams, we would like to allow for this in the time allocation and will therefore have a system for teachers to make a request. On the platform, you will be able to inform us of any students with a formally recognised allowance of extra time in an educational setting. We reserve the right to verify this information if necessary.

We will apply this 25% allocation in the following way:

number of team members eligible for extra time / team size) x 1.25 [amount of extra time] x 25 [standard number of hours]

• No additional time = 25 hours
• 1 person = 26 hrs 34 mins
• 2 people = 28 hrs 8 mins
• 3 people = 29 hrs 41 mins
• 4 people = 31 hrs 15 mins

This means that the maximum time allowance for a team of 4 where all students qualify for 25% extra time is 31hrs 15min.