The disruption to the national GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations in England during the summer (June-August) exam period of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been well documented; however, less attention has been paid to the challenges faced by complementary schools in preparing students for GCSEs in heritage languages. This paper addresses this lacuna in exploring the results of a small-scale study investigating the challenges faced by eight Polish school heads as they attempted to follow the various guidelines for the 2020 GCSE exam period. Findings suggest that support from the mainstream sector was limited, and Polish complementary schools struggled with being seen as less legitimate sites of learning, as heads, teachers and students negotiated the changes made to the GCSE exam due to the pandemic. This paper highlights the negative positioning of Polish language exams within the English education system through the lens of a linguistic ideology which positions some languages as more worthy of study than others. It also argues that the pandemic highlighted how complementary schools and teachers working within them are frequently seen as less professionally competent than those in mainstream schools and calls for greater recognition for complementary schooling.