We've made some changes
We know that being able to design an inclusive curriculum matters to you and your students and it also matters to us. As market leaders, we also realise the unique influence and position we have in education and assessment.
We've introduced three modern texts and a new poetry cluster, Worlds and Lives, to our GCSE English Literature specification to make our offer more balanced and inclusive.
Learn more about the new texts:
- Princess & The Hustler by Chinonyerem Odimba
- Leave Taking by Winsome Pinnock
- My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal
These changes are part of our ongoing commitment to make meaningful change and improve our curriculums. To help us make the right changes we talked with teachers, external experts and academics, and publishers about diversity and inclusion in English literature.
We also wanted to keep the successful assessment philosophy and design principles of the GCSE English Literature exam that work for you and your students. Essential to this is our Statement of importance. This explains what it means to study literature and underpins how it's assessed.
Why we've made changes
Watch the video below to find out more about why we've made these changes.
Removed texts
To make space for new literature we had the challenging task of removing three of our existing texts. We considered:
- the popularity of different texts with our centres currently
- the accessibility and relevance of the themes and issues they explore
- how successfully students responded to the texts in the exam compared to others
- a review of question setting over time.
Applying this thinking, we’ve removed:
- The History Boys by Alan Bennett
- Never Let Me Go by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephen and Mark Haddon.
Last exams for these texts are in summer 2024.
Join us as we work towards making sure young people have an English literature curriculum that reflects their lives and modern Britain.
