Extra time is not something your school can give you. Neither are rest breaks. Both sit on the short list of adjustments that only the QCAA can approve, at every level of senior assessment — your internal exams, the common internal assessment, and the externals in October and November. Your teacher can move a due date and your principal can seat you in a separate room, but nobody at your school can add a minute to a timed paper. That decision is made from an application your school lodges on your behalf, against deadlines most students never see.
This page covers what access arrangements and reasonable adjustments actually cover, who signs off on what, when the applications are due, and — the part almost nobody explains — what happens to your subject result if illness stops you sitting an external assessment.
What AARA is, and what it is not
AARA stands for access arrangements and reasonable adjustments. If you have heard a teacher call it special provisions, that is the same thing under its old name; the QCAA still notes the former term on its student-facing pages. The two halves are not interchangeable:
Access arrangements
What they are: actions taken by the school so that a student with an eligible impairment that may not be covered by the definition of disability can access assessment.
Reasonable adjustments
What they are: actions taken by the school so that a student with an eligible impairment as a result of a disability and/or medical condition, and experiencing other circumstances creating a barrier to completing assessment, can be assessed on the same basis as other students.
The phrase doing the work in both definitions is on the same basis as other students. AARA exists to remove a barrier between you and the assessment. It does not exist to lower the bar. The handbook says so directly: AARA cannot be used to compensate for learning that has not occurred, or to exempt you from the knowledge and skill requirements of a subject.
Eligibility turns on the functional impact of your condition, not on its name. Two students with the same diagnosis can qualify for completely different adjustments, or one for adjustments and the other for none, because what is assessed is how the condition affects you in a timed assessment. The QCAA groups the qualifying circumstances into three categories that carry different application processes and timelines: long-term and chronic conditions, short-term conditions and temporary injuries, and illness and misadventure. Mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are named explicitly among the barriers AARA covers. So are certain cultural obligations, including Sorry Business and Sad News.
What is not eligible
The ineligible list is short, specific and published, and it is worth reading before you convince yourself a case exists. Students are not eligible for AARA on these grounds:
Two of those are worth sitting with. Misreading the exam timetable is on the list, which is the strongest argument there is for putting your own exam dates somewhere you will actually look — the 2026 external exam timetable has a calendar download for exactly this. And a family holiday booked over an assessment is not misadventure, no matter how long ago it was booked or who booked it.
Who approves what
In Units 3 and 4, every adjustment falls into one of two buckets. Principal-reported AARA are authorised by your principal or their delegate, who must be reasonably satisfied the need exists and able to produce evidence justifying the decision. The QCAA does not specify what that evidence must be, and the school does not upload it; it notifies the QCAA through the portal and keeps the documentation on file. QCAA-approved AARA can only be approved by the QCAA, after it has considered supporting documentation submitted with the application.
The split is not intuitive, so here is the part that matters most:
| Adjustment | Internal exam | External assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Extra time | QCAA-approved | QCAA-approved |
| Rest breaks | QCAA-approved | QCAA-approved |
| Computer | Principal-reported | QCAA-approved |
| Assistive technology | Principal-reported | QCAA-approved |
| Reader | Principal-reported | QCAA-approved |
| Scribe | Principal-reported | QCAA-approved |
| Alternative format papers (braille, large print, A3 enlargement) | Principal-reported | QCAA-approved |
| Variation to venue | Principal-reported | QCAA-approved |
| Varied seating (separate room, small group, out-of-order seating) | Principal-reported | Principal-reported |
| Medication, drink, bite-sized food, diabetes management | Principal-reported | Principal-reported |
| Physical equipment (specialised chair, cushion, crutches, heat pack, noise-cancelling headphones) | Principal-reported | Principal-reported |
| Vision aids (coloured overlay, magnifier) | Principal-reported | Principal-reported |
| Extension to a due date | Principal-reported | Not applicable |
| Comparable assessment | Principal-reported | Not applicable |
Three things fall out of that table. Extra time and rest breaks are the two adjustments that never come from your school, at any level — those are the ones with the long lead time and the documentary burden. Several adjustments your school can wave through for an internal exam become QCAA decisions the moment the paper is an external one, which is why an arrangement you have used all year is not automatically yours in the exam block. And extensions do not exist for external assessment, because the whole state sits the paper on the same day.
The deadlines, including the ones that have already gone
AARA deadlines are expressed in school weeks rather than dates, which makes them easy to read past. Translated into the 2026 Queensland state school calendar, where Term 3 ran 13 July to 18 September and Term 4 runs 6 October to 11 December, the sequence for a Year 12 sitting externals this year looks like this. Non-state schools set their own term dates, so check yours against your school's calendar.
- End of February 2026
Alternative format papers for external assessment. Braille and large-print papers are produced individually, and the QCAA is explicit that late applications may not be possible.
- End of Term 1 2026
QCAA-approved AARA for existing long-term and chronic conditions, covering external assessment. If a condition was already documented, this was the window.
- End of Week 5, Term 3 — around 14 August 2026
QCAA-approved AARA for other conditions unlikely to resolve before mid-October. This is the deadline for the injury or condition that arrived mid-year: the broken wrist in June, the diagnosis in July. It has passed.
- End of Term 3 — 18 September 2026
Principal-reported AARA notification for external assessment. Still open. If you need medication in the room, a separate desk, a cushion, a drink or noise-cancelling headphones, this is the one your school can still act on.
- From 12 October 2026
Illness and misadventure applications open — 14 days before the external assessment period starts on 26 October — and close seven days after your final assessment.
If your circumstances change after a deadline, the answer is not silence. A missed date does not close the door; it closes the guarantee. The handbook's own note is that if the timelines are not adhered to, the QCAA cannot guarantee applications will be processed before the relevant assessment. And where a long-term condition deteriorates after a decision has been made, a further application can be submitted with updated information.
Illness and misadventure: the separate process
Illness and misadventure is the branch of AARA for the thing nobody could plan for. The principles are tight: the event must be unforeseen and beyond your control, an adverse effect must be demonstrated, and the situation cannot be of your own or your parents' choosing. The handbook's examples of qualifying circumstances include a summons or subpoena to appear in court, the death or funeral of a close family member, and Sorry Business.
For external assessment, an application should be submitted for students who:
- are unable to attend or attempt an external assessment due to illness or misadventure
- attend and complete the assessment but consider their performance was significantly and adversely affected by illness or misadventure
- begin the assessment but are forced to abandon it
Read the middle one again, because it is the one students dismiss. You do not have to have missed the exam. The manager of the QCAA's AARA unit puts it plainly: students are still eligible to apply even if they have not missed an exam. Sitting a paper with a fever and finishing it is grounds for an application, and it is a category of case that goes unlodged because the student walked out of the room assuming that attending had spent their claim.
There are four situations an illness and misadventure application cannot cover: the same condition for which you already hold a QCAA-approved AARA, unless you can demonstrate a significant deterioration or complication that diminished your performance; matters you could have avoided, such as misreading the timetable; circumstances of your own or your parents' choosing; and variations in how the assessment was administered, such as a change of venue.
If the assessment is internal
The order of operations is different, and getting it wrong wastes time. For internal assessment, illness and misadventure is the last step, not the first. Your school must exhaust principal-reported AARA before contacting the QCAA — in practice that means an extension to a new due date, or a comparable assessment, both of which your principal can authorise without any QCAA involvement. Only once those options are gone can an application be lodged.
If you cannot produce a final response by the new due date, the school may make a judgment on the evidence it does have, such as your draft. That is one more reason to treat drafts as real work rather than a formality: see why drafts matter before submission and the IA timeline from task sheet to submission. Note also that illness and misadventure applications are not required for Applied and Applied (Essential) subjects; schools contact the QCAA's AARA unit directly in those cases.
The three Ds your medical report has to clear
Most declined medical applications fail on the paperwork rather than the merits. The QCAA reduces its requirements to three tests, and a certificate that misses any one of them is not sufficient:
Doctor
It must be completed by a doctor. Pharmacy certificates and self-generated online reports are not sufficient.
Diagnosis
It must confirm the illness or condition. A certificate noting only that you have a medical condition and are “unfit for duty” is not sufficient.
Dates
It must confirm when you were sick, and those dates must align with the assessment named in the application.
Two further rules decide whether a report will be accepted at all. The person writing it must have specific knowledge of the illness, injury, trauma or intervening event, and must not have a close personal relationship with you or be related to you — a parent who is a GP cannot write your report. And for temporary illness, the health professional must have examined, treated or consulted with you in the days immediately preceding or following the external assessment. A note obtained three weeks later, from a doctor who never saw you while you were unwell, does not cover the dates it needs to cover.
Where the circumstance is not medical, the evidence comes from a relevant independent professional or third party instead — the handbook names social workers, members of the clergy, police officers, solicitors and funeral directors. Where extenuating circumstances make appropriate evidence impossible to obtain, section 6.6 of the handbook covers exceptional circumstances, and the AARA unit takes those calls directly.
What actually happens to your result
Here is the question underneath every other question on this page, and the answer is not on the page most students land on. Start with what does not happen: the external assessment is not rescheduled. There is no resit, no later sitting, no alternative paper. The whole state sits each subject once.
What happens instead is a calculation. Fiona Baker, who manages the QCAA's AARA unit, describes the process in a video published for parents and carers, and it is the clearest public statement of the mechanism:
Read that as a sentence about your own marks, because that is what it is. The QCAA does not guess at your exam performance in the abstract. It looks at where you already sit after three internal assessments, finds the students who sat where you sit, and uses what they did on the paper to work out what you would reasonably have done. The banked marks are the input.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable but worth naming: a student whose internal results are strong and consistent has a calculated result that reflects that strength, and a student who was banking on the exam to rescue a patchy year has less to work with. That is not a penalty applied to sick students; it is the arithmetic of a process that has nothing else to reason from. If you want the underlying weightings, how your QCAA subject result is built works through the IA1–IA3 and EA split subject by subject.
One exception sits outside all of this. In General (Senior External Examination) subjects there is no internal assessment at all, so there is nothing for a calculation to start from. Students must complete the examination to receive a result, and no alternative arrangements can be made for a missed written paper. The single concession is for the oral component of a language examination, which may be arranged by telephone if the QCAA is notified as soon as practical.
If your application is declined
A decline is not the end of the process, and there are two separate routes forward. Your school can submit a new application with updated supporting documentation, which is the right move when the original was thin — a missing school statement, a medical report that failed one of the three Ds. Applications submitted without an appropriate school statement are declined until the evidence is provided, so a decline is sometimes just a paperwork failure wearing a formal name.
The second route is a review. If you are dissatisfied with a decision, you may apply for an internal review under section 79 of the QCAA Act. The application must be in writing, must address the grounds including any new evidence, must be lodged by your school in the QCAA portal, and must be made within 14 days from the date of the decision notice. Review officers who were not involved in the original decision consider it afresh, and both you and your school are notified of the outcome. If you are still dissatisfied, the school may apply under section 82 for an external review by the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
Key takeaways
| Point | Details |
|---|---|
| Extra time is a QCAA decision | Extra time and rest breaks require QCAA approval at every level of assessment. Your school cannot grant either one. |
| Unit 1–2 arrangements do not carry over | They count as evidence towards a Units 3 and 4 application, but they do not guarantee the same adjustment in the summative year. |
| Attending the exam does not spend your claim | An application can be made if you sat the paper and your performance was significantly and adversely affected. |
| The report must clear three Ds | Doctor, diagnosis, dates — and the practitioner must have seen you in the days immediately around the assessment. |
| There is no resit | An approved application produces a calculated result derived from your internal marks and how comparable students performed on the exam. |
| Fourteen days to seek review | An internal review under section 79 must be lodged by your school within 14 days of the decision notice. |
The application you cannot lodge yourself
The structural fact worth ending on is that you are not the applicant. Every AARA and every illness and misadventure application is submitted by your school on your behalf, through a portal you have no login for, on a timeline you were probably never shown. Your part is the part that comes first and that nobody else can do: telling someone, early, and getting the documentation that makes an application possible.
That gap is where cases go missing. Not because a school refused, but because a student decided their situation was not serious enough to mention, or waited until after the exam to say anything, or assumed the certificate they already had would do. None of those are calls a student should be making alone in the week before an exam block. Say it early, say it to the external assessment coordinator by name, and let the people with portal access decide what is worth lodging.
Going in with more already banked
The clearest lesson in the calculation the QCAA runs is that your internal assessment results are doing more work than they appear to. They set three-quarters of your subject result in most subjects, and if illness ever puts an external assessment out of reach, they become the entire basis on which your result is worked out. Marks banked before October are the most durable marks you have.
The source for everything on this page is Section 6 of the QCAA's QCE and QCIA policy and procedures handbook, together with the QCAA's AARA pages and myQCE guidance for students, published under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence. Deadlines and arrangements change between years; check the current handbook and your school's own dates. The QCAA's AARA unit takes questions on 1300 381 575 or at aara@qcaa.qld.edu.au, though applications must come from your school.
