KS5 – English
“Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.”
It is important to us that all students with a love of literature get the broadest possible choices, so we offer a two-year course, which also includes the one-year AS. ― Jonathan Stroud
Students begin A’ level study in Year 12 with units on drama, poetry and Gothic literature, leading to a PPE examination in the summer. Students complete a comparative study of Ibsen’s ‘a Doll’s House’ and Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’. They also have an opportunity to begin working on coursework. Following on from that, they build on existing course components and take their A’ level at the end of Year 13. The course offers excellent opportunities for extension and extra-curricular learning, as the Shakespeare element has to be viewed as well as read. This means that trips to the Globe or Stratford-upon-Avon will be a must for all Literature students.
The A’ level examination is just as exciting and offers a broad range of thematic groups from which texts are drawn. Studies include Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’; final revision for the final examinations on Paper 1: Drama and Poetry pre-1900 and Paper 2: Comparative and Contextual Study and their second NEAB coursework.
The two-year course includes a 20% coursework component alongside two longer examination papers. The coursework component is particularly exciting, as it offers students the opportunity to guide their own reading choices, and they study three texts in detail for two pieces of coursework.