HSC exam provisions program
HSC exam provisions are practical adjustments (such as extra time, rest breaks, readers or writers). They help students with medical conditions or disabilities access their HSC written exams, ensuring they can show their knowledge fairly.
Exam provisions support students to take part in HSC exams
HSC exam provisions give students with exam needs practical support to access, read and respond to the HSC exams. By ‘exam needs’, we mean needs caused by how a student’s medical condition or disability affects them in the exam room.
For example, a student might need:
- a writer if they don’t usually handwrite exam responses themselves
- a reader if they don’t usually read printed exam papers
- a large-font exam paper if they don’t usually use exam papers with standard-sized fonts.
Exam provisions are meant to give fair access to the HSC exams. This means that they support a student to read or otherwise access the questions, then communicate their responses to the markers.
They are not about achieving potential. This is a much bigger task, which for all students includes commitment, teaching quality and exam preparation.
Illness and misadventure applications are for unforeseen events
There is a different process for students who get sick, have an accident or another mishap shortly before or during their exam. These students have to take steps immediately.
Find out more about the process and what you need to do straight away on the illness and misadventure page.
Exam provisions differ from school-based adjustments
HSC students might be able to use 2 types of reasonable adjustment:
- school-based adjustments to take part in everyday classwork, tests, assessments and HSC trial exams
- exam provisions to take part in the HSC exams.
The school arranges school-based adjustments, and we (NESA) approve HSC exam provisions.
School-based adjustments might not be appropriate for the HSC exams. This means that students might be able to use an adjustment for their daily schoolwork or assessments but not use the same provision in the HSC exams. Schools should tell students this.
The reason for this is that we have to ensure fairness for all HSC students. Exam provisions can’t give one student an unfair advantage over others. We also want to approve the same exam provisions for all students with similar exam needs, and those provisions might be different to what the school allows.
To understand more about how we decide which exam provisions to approve, see the ‘Our decisions are based on 10 principles’ section of the Appeals page.
A wide range of students use exam provisions
More than 10,000 HSC students ask for exam provisions each year. You can see the data on this page.
Students sitting the HSC might need exam provisions for:
- a permanent condition, such as a vision impairment
- a condition that might change in how it affects them, such as ADHD
- a temporary condition, such as a broken arm
- an intermittent condition, such as back pain when sitting for long periods.
Any student with a disability or condition listed in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 can ask for HSC exam provisions. The Act includes disabilities that are:
- intellectual
- physical
- related to disease or illness
- learning disorders
- psychological.
It also includes ‘imputed’ disabilities, which means undiagnosed disabilities that the school team agrees have a functional impact on the student. See Some students don’t have a formal diagnosis.
Some conditions are not eligible for exam provisions
Exam provisions are designed to support all students to access, read and respond to the HSC exams.
There are some circumstances that we will not approve exam provisions for. Students can’t use exam provisions for:
- loss of preparation time or difficulty doing a course
- difficulty with reading due to English being an additional language or dialect
- conditions that might not occur during an exam (also called ‘episodic conditions’) unless the exam environment might cause them.
If the exam environment might cause an episodic condition, students can apply for exam provisions to avoid it. For example, if fluorescent lighting often triggers a migraine, a student might ask to sit near a window with natural light.
If a student suffers an episode of the condition during the exam, they can use the illness or misadventure process to ensure we can give them a fair mark. Find out what to do on the illness and misadventure page.
We are improving this program
We accepted 8 recommendations from the 2025 independent review of the NSW HSC Disability Provisions Program. These recommendations support improved equity and accessibility for HSC students sitting end-of-year exams.
The program was called the Disability Provisions Program. It has been renamed the HSC Exam Provisions Program for the 2026 HSC.