GCSE and A Level English Literature: teaching our diverse texts

Lydia Ridding, English Subject Advisors

In 2021, working with our expert consultative panel, our colleagues in the Lit in Colour programme and with you, our teachers and students, we made the decision to add some new, diverse texts to our GCSE and A Level English Literature specifications. These texts will be assessed for the first time in the summer 2024 series, so we thought now would be a good time to share some resources and teaching ideas on the texts.

GCSE English Literature: Modern drama

Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking has replaced My Mother Said I Never Should as a modern drama option (Section A of Paper 1) from first teaching September 2022 and first assessment June 2024. 

Resources 

OCR supporting resources, including sample assessment materials, delivery guide and candidate style answers, can all be found on Teach Cambridge (login required; contact your exams officer if you need access). 

Recently published by Nick Hern Books, GCSE Study Guide for English Literature: Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking, by Lynette Carr Armstrong and Samantha Wharton provides an excellent overview of the text, with detailed and engaging material on context, characters, themes and language, form and structure. We love the stills taken from the Bush Theatre’s 2018 performance, as well as the OCR comparison sample essay on extracts taken from Leave Taking and Princess & the Hustler by Chinonyerem Odimba. 

We are also grateful to our friends at BBC Bitesize for producing revision materials. 

Teaching ideas 

We recently hosted a webinar for teachers where we discussed approaches to teaching and studying the play, including other dramas to use as unseen extracts. You might like to explore this list with your students: 

• Nine Night by Natasha Gordon 
• The Amen Corner by James Baldwin 
• Three Sisters by Inua Ellams 
• A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney 
• Something Dark by Lemn Sissay 
• Gone Too Far! by Bola Agbaje 
• Sweet Like Chocolate Boy by Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu 
• Pigeon English by Gbolahan Obisesan 
• Sucker Punch by Roy Williams. 

Students could read the opening scene from one or more of the plays listed here in groups and look to identify similarities and differences with Leave Taking, perhaps before having a go at writing their own exam style questions. This exercise can be a good opportunity to revise features of the form such as characterisation and dialogue, staging and audience responses.

GCSE English Literature: Poetry anthology

In 2022 we replaced 15 poems in our Towards a World Unknown anthology with new, diverse choices.

Love and Relationships

• Flirtation’, Rita Dove
• ‘Poem for my Love’, June Jordan 
• ‘Lullaby’, Fatimah Asghar 
• ‘The Perseverance’, Raymond Antrobus
• ‘Looking at Your Hands’, Martin Carter 

Replaced poems are ‘A Broken Appointment’, Thomas Hardy; ‘Fin de Fête’, Charlotte Mew; ‘The Sorrow of True Love’, Edward Thomas; ‘An Arundel Tomb’, Philip Larkin and ‘Long Distance II’, Tony Harrison.

Conflict 

• ‘Papa-T’, Fred D’Aguiar 
• ‘Songs for the People’, Frances E. W. Harper
  
• ‘We Lived Happily during the War’, Ilya Kaminsky 
• ‘Colonization in Reverse’, Louise Bennett
  
•  ‘Thirteen’, Caleb Femi
  

Replaced poems are  ‘A Poison Tree’, William Blake; ‘The Man He Killed’, Thomas Hardy; ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Wilfred Owen; ‘Punishment’, Seamus Heaney and ‘Phrase Book’, Jo Shapcott. 

Youth and Age 

• ‘Equilibrium’, Theresa Lola
•  ‘Prayer’, Zaffar Kunial 
• ‘Happy Birthday Moon’, Raymond Antrobus 
• ‘Tea With Our Grandmothers’, Warsan Shire
  
•  ‘Theme for English B’, Langston Hughes 

Replaced poems are ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, John Keats; ‘Spring and Fall: to a Young Child’, Gerard Manley Hopkins; ‘Ode’, Arthur O’Shaughnessy; ‘Red Roses’, Anne Sexton and ‘Farther’, Owen Sheers. 

Madeleine Champagnie, English teacher at Thames Christian School, recently wrote a blog about how to approach teaching the new poems. You can also check out our delivery guides for each of the new poem clusters on Teach Cambridge.

A Level English Literature: Component 2

For A Level, we introduced nine novels to the Component 2 suggested set text lists for first teach September 2022, with their first assessment in June 2024. 

Resources for all new texts can be found on Teach Cambridge. 

American Literature 1880–1940: Passing by Nella Larsen (1929) 

Written in 1928, Larsen’s novel centres on the connection between two light-skinned black women: Irene Redfield and her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is now ‘passing’ as a white woman. As a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen delves into ideas about identity, race and class disparity in America during the period. 

A new adaptation directed by Rebecca Hall and starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson is available on Netflix. 

The Gothic: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) 

Adding a pre-war British Gothic novel to the list felt like a natural way to extend our understanding of The Gothic in the 20th century. Du Maurier’s unnamed narrator tells us of meeting her husband, Maxim de Winter, and their life in the wake of his first wife - the glamorous, mysterious and dead Rebecca. Exploring psychological terror, sexuality, secrets and violence, du Maurier’s novel is a classic modern Gothic. 

Dystopia: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993) 

We’re really excited about the addition of Butler’s novel, which seems alarmingly prescient now, engaged as it is with ideas of ecological and political collapse. It centres on a young black girl gifted with hyper-empathy, Lauren Olamina, who witnesses her community disintegrate and sets out to save herself and spread the word of ‘Earthseed’. 

Women in Literature: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019) 

The most recent novel to be added to our lists, this is a text we know has really resonated with teachers and students. Evaristo’s Booker-winning novel offers a really valuable engagement with womanhood, relationships and gender identity, through its cast of characters. The novel explores motherhood, love, race, and otherness across generations, spurring from the opening night of a new play at the National Theatre. 

The Immigrant Experience: The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (1956) 

Selvon’s novel, set in post-1948 National Act London, offers a window into not just the Caribbean immigration but the varying migrant communities who made a home and a life for themselves in London after the war. Exploring class, found family and sexuality, Selvon shows us a London rich in voices and experiences, one that disenchants while it offers opportunity for his characters.

New Lit in Colour resources from the Educational Recording Agency

We are delighted to be able to share our exciting new resources, created in collaboration with our friends at the Educational Recording Agency. Click here (will insert link) to see our audiovisual carousel featuring clips from the BBC archive of diverse writers on our A Level and GCSE specifications. You can watch Bernadine Evaristo reflect on her Booker Prize win for Girl, Woman, Other or listen to an audio version of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, plus much more. 

To access the Lit in Colour mapped resource area you will first need to register for your licence. State schools in England are licensed under a central agreement with the DfE, making your access to the service FREE of charge. 

This licence enables educational establishments to make recordings or copies of TV and radio programmes for educational use legally. The licence covers the TV and radio output of ERA’s Broadcaster Members. This means that staff and students at ERA licensed institutions can record or make copies of programmes for educational use without seeking individual permissions.

Stay connected

If you have any other questions you can leave comments below, or email us at English@ocr.org.uk. You can also sign up to receive email updates or follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @OCR_English.

About the author

Prior to joining OCR in June 2023, Lydia spent 20 years working in a range of sixth form colleges across the country, teaching A Level and GCSE qualifications in English. She was a coursework moderator with OCR for a number of years and has an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck University.