A Level English Literature
EXAM BOARD: Pearson Edexcel
A two-year literature course exploring drama, prose and poetry – eight literary texts plus unseen poetry – through close reading, comparison, context and critical debate.
Every unit develops the skills at the heart of the qualification – informed personal response, analysis of language, form and structure, contextual understanding, comparison and engagement with critical interpretations. Students learn to read as critics and write as essayists, building from confident analysis of single texts towards sophisticated comparative argument. The aim is for every student to leave with a lasting love of literature and the analytical skills demanded by top universities.
Year 12
| Term & Topic | Unit overview
(the order of units may change to suit the needs of our current students.) |
|
|---|---|---|
| AutumnShakespearean Comedy – A Midsummer Night’s Dream | The course opens with baseline assessment and an introduction to the conventions of comedy, before an in-depth study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Students explore the play’s interwoven plots, the movement from court to forest and back, its treatment of love, illusion, authority and transformation, and the mechanicals’ play-within-a-play, while beginning work with the Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology – Comedy – learning to weigh critics’ views against their own and to write analytical essays with an assured critical voice. | |
| AutumnRestoration Comedy – The Rover | Comedy moves from Athens to carnival-time Naples with Aphra Behn’s The Rover. Students analyse Restoration stagecraft, disguise and masquerade, the libertine ethic and the play’s sharp interrogation of marriage, money and female agency – drawing comparisons with A Midsummer Night’s Dream to deepen their understanding of the genre across time and of Behn’s place as a pioneering woman dramatist. | |
| SpringCrime & Detection – The Moonstone | The prose theme of Crime and Detection begins with Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Students examine the Victorian sensation novel and the origins of English detective fiction, the novel’s multiple narrators and its unreliable testimony, and its contexts of empire, class and gender – building the contextual knowledge (AO3) that anchors the comparative essay. | |
| SpringCrime & Detection – The Cutting Season | Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season completes the prose pairing. Students analyse the contemporary literary thriller, its plantation setting and the layering of a present-day murder over the buried history of slavery, then learn to construct genuinely comparative essays – moving fluently between the two novels around shared ideas of truth, guilt, inheritance and justice rather than treating each text in isolation. | |
| SummerContemporary Poetry & the Unseen | A unit on modern voices built around Poems of the Decade. Students study the specified post-2000 poems in depth and develop a reliable toolkit for approaching unseen poetry – voice, form, imagery, structure and tone – before practising the comparative unseen task that opens Paper 3. Coursework text options are also introduced ready for independent summer reading. | |
| SummerMock Exams |
Mock Exams The year ends with full mock papers on the drama, prose and poetry studied so far, with detailed feedback against the assessment objectives – so every student knows exactly where they stand and what to target in Year 13. |
|
Year 13
| Term & Topic | Unit overview
(the order of units may change to suit the needs of our current students.) |
|
|---|---|---|
| AutumnThe Romantic Poet – John Keats | The specified poet: John Keats. Students study the selected odes, narrative poems and sonnets, exploring Keats’s Romantic contexts and his preoccupations with beauty, mortality, imagination, myth and the natural world – completing their preparation for both sections of the Poetry paper. | |
| AutumnCoursework (NEA) | Students research, plan and draft their non-examination assessment: an extended comparative essay of 2,500-3,000 words on two free-choice texts, supervised through one-to-one tutorials. This is each student’s chance to pursue a genuine personal interest – and to produce a piece of writing of near-undergraduate standard. | |
| AutumnCritical Voices & Revision | A synoptic unit revisiting all examined texts through the lens of critical interpretation. Students return to the Critical Anthology, apply feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic readings to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Rover, sharpen comparative planning for the Prose paper, and refine timed-essay technique across all three papers. | |
| SpringExam Practice |
Exam Practice & Official A Level Exams Coursework is finalised and submitted, followed by rounds of full mock papers and personalised feedback in Drama, Prose and Poetry, leading into the official A Level examinations in the summer. |
|
All three written papers are sat in May/June of Year 13 and are open book – students take clean copies of their texts into the exam. Across the course students study eight literary texts plus unseen poetry.
Paper 1: Drama
- Section A: one essay on the Shakespeare play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), informed by the ideas in the Critical Anthology
- Section B: one essay on the other drama text (The Rover)
- Open book – clean copies of the plays allowed; the Critical Anthology may not be taken in
Paper 2: Prose
- One comparative essay on the two studied novels from the Crime and Detection theme
- At least one of the two texts is pre-1900 (The Moonstone, paired with The Cutting Season)
- Rewards sustained comparison of themes, methods and contexts across both texts
Paper 3: Poetry
- Section A: compare an unseen post-2000 poem with a named poem from Poems of the Decade
- Section B: one essay on the specified poet – John Keats
- Open book – clean copies of the poetry texts allowed
Coursework (NEA)
- One extended comparative essay of 2,500-3,000 words on two free-choice texts
- Texts are chosen freely, guided by the teacher, and must not repeat the examined texts
- Internally assessed and externally moderated by Pearson