I thought what follows might be informative, seeing some worried comments about and, also, the petition to enlarge GCSE texts selection (the wording for the petition ought to be more focused and informed – there is NO reading list for GCSE and you need to specify that the issue is with GCSE English Literature, I think).
Over twenty odd years, these are the ONLY GCSE English Literature GCSE prose and drama exam texts I have worked on with students.
Wuthering Heights (now on A level spec for a couple of boards)
Great Expectations
Anita and Me
Of Mice and Men
DNA
Blood Brothers
A View From the Bridge
Romeo and Juliet
An Inspector Calls
Jekyll and Hyde
Macbeth
Othello
The Woman in Black
These are the only exam GCSE texts I have ever done across schools, support teaching and tuition. Of Mice and Men and A View from the Bridge got booted off the GCSE specs by Gove (because they’re American) but it’s still there for me because I also teach IGCSE. In addition to these texts, across GCSE on the four boards I have worked across, Eduqas, WJEC, AQA and OCR plus Edexcel IGCSE, I have also to tackle poetry (which extends into the IGCSE Language syllabus too) where the situation in covering a wider and more representative range of authors is better (see below, for why) but even so…!
As I said, I have been teaching GCSE for twenty years and, until the situation with coursework changed and we went to full exam with the first teaching specs for 2015, you DID have more choice with the coursework texts as long as you satisfied the requirements. I am currently working with AQA, EDUQAS and Edexcel (IGCSE) and for all of these there is an additional poetry anthology, which does cover BAME authors to a small degree, but not a great range and I have been teaching ‘Search for my Tongue’ by Sujatta Bhatt for all those twenty years and John Agard’s ‘Half Caste’ for most of that time because there is a requirement to cover BAME authors in the poetry component, which was put in place twenty odd years ago. At that time a separate poetry and short story component by BAME authors was referred to as ‘Other Cultures’ (the word ‘Other’ tells you much, doesn’t it?) then the wording changed to ‘Different Cultures’, before the wording was dropped altogether and the texts included in the exam canon through a poetry anthology.
There is no ‘reading list’ for GCSE English Literature or English GCSE, but the shake-up that happened when coursework was removed and all GCSEs strengthened for first teaching 2015 was and remains inadequate and for GCSE English Literature, there is a too small selection of exam texts from which you can choose, with some variation across exam boards. If I were queen, I would make that selection of texts much, much wider because OF COURSE this is part of a much bigger issue of dearth of exposure to the brilliance of culture in this country, predicating what we do, instead, mostly on long-dead white folks.
That’s it. And OF COURSE I wrote to complain when the specs changed and it was the same old thing moreorless.
Anna Vaught Writes 