How to choose texts to teach in English

Choosing the texts a department teaches is one of the most consequential decisions an English HoD makes. The list shapes what students read across five years, which voices they encounter, what they think literature can do, and (at GCSE) what the exam will ask them to write about. It is also a decision that often gets made under real constraints: Specification options at KS4, the books already in the cupboard, the texts staff feel confident teaching, and the pull of whatever the department has always done.

This guide walks through how to make those choices well. It draws on work English departments have been doing in recent years, including the push to broaden the canon, the EEF's evidence on disciplinary literacy, and the practical reality of preparing students for AQA, Edexcel, and OCR specifications. The aim is a workable framework for a HoD reviewing their text list.

Before drafting a text list, the department should agree on what an English Literature student leaves Year 11 having read, encountered, and become able to think about. Not a set of titles, but a set of claims about literary experience. What range of voices should they have heard? What forms (novel, play, poetry, short story, essay) should they have worked with seriously? What historical span? What kinds of difficulty should they have wrestled with?

This sounds abstract, but it produces sharper text choices once you have it written down. A department that has decided 'our students should leave having read at least three plays by women' has a concrete commitment that constrains the KS3 list in a productive way. A department that has decided 'our students should leave having encountered at least one substantial pre-1700 text in full, not just extracts' has a commitment that shapes Year 9 differently.

The alternative (choosing each text individually for its own merits) tends to produce a list that is the sum of individual choices but does not add up to a coherent reading experience. The point of writing down the aims first is to make the cumulative shape visible before the individual decisions are made.

GCSE English Literature is where text choice gets most constrained, because the specifications (AQA, Edexcel, OCR, and Eduqas) all prescribe their own set lists. Within those lists there is real flexibility, but the constraints are real and ignoring them costs students marks. The table below summarises the main GCSE choices at the time of writing; check the current specifications before finalising anything.

The deliberate part matters. Many departments inherit their GCSE choices from the previous HoD and never revisit them. The set of texts chosen ten years ago might not be the best fit for the current cohort, the current staff, or the department's stated aims. A periodic review of GCSE choices (every three years, say, in line with a normal curriculum review cycle) is a healthier rhythm than 'whatever we have always done'.

The conversation about whose voices appear in the English curriculum has shifted significantly over the last decade, and most departments have done genuine work on it. The work that tends to land best treats representation as part of literary education rather than as a separate compliance task.

That means asking what each text contributes to the cumulative experience of literature across the five years, rather than asking whether the list 'has enough' of any particular category. A text by a Black British writer is there because the writing is doing something specific that students will be richer for having encountered. The same is true of texts by women writers, working-class writers, and writers from outside Britain.

The practical question is what to drop. KS3 tends to be where this work happens, because the GCSE constraints leave less room. If you want students to read Bernardine Evaristo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, or Andrea Levy by Year 11, those texts have to land somewhere, and that usually means displacing other texts that were on the list because they had always been on the list. Doing those swaps carefully (and being honest about what is lost as well as gained) is better than layering new texts on top of an already overstuffed scheme of work.

Two extremes tend to underperform. A reading list entirely composed of canonical texts (Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontes, Hardy, Eliot) gives students cultural fluency but can feel disconnected from how literature works as a living form. A list composed entirely of contemporary writing gives students the immediate hook but leaves them under-equipped for A-Level and beyond.

Most strong departments end up with a balance: A core of canonical texts taught carefully, alongside contemporary writing that connects to the issues and forms students are encountering elsewhere. The balance shifts across the years. KS3 tends to lean more contemporary, both to build the reading habit and to introduce voices the GCSE specifications under-represent. KS4 leans more canonical because the specifications require it.

It also helps to think about how the canonical and the contemporary speak to each other. A pairing of 'Animal Farm' with a contemporary piece on power and propaganda gives both texts more traction than either would have alone. The same applies to pairing a Shakespeare tragedy with a contemporary play on similar themes.

Text choice has to take seriously the reading age of the cohort, particularly at KS3. A text that demands a reading age of fifteen and lands on a class with average reading age of nine will not produce the disciplinary thinking the unit was designed to teach, regardless of the text's literary merits. The EEF's guidance on disciplinary literacy is useful here: It treats reading the text as a serious teachable skill, not as a precondition.

In practice this means two things alongside text selection. First, knowing the reading age and reading habits of the cohort. A department teaching a cohort with significant numbers of struggling readers needs to factor that into KS3 choices, and to plan the support scaffolding the text demands. Second, choosing texts where the literary value can survive being read carefully, slowly, and with support. A novel that depends on tonal subtlety the cohort cannot yet hear may not be the right Year 8 choice, even if it is a great novel.

This is not an argument for dumbing down. It is an argument for honesty about which texts can do the work in which contexts. The same novel might be the wrong choice for a Year 8 mixed-attainment class and exactly the right choice for a Year 10 set with stronger reading habits.

A common failure mode is choosing a text because it sounds good (or because the HoD loves it) and then trying to build a unit around it. The result is often a beautiful text shoehorned into a scheme of work that does not really know what to do with it.

A more reliable approach is to start with what the unit is supposed to do (which disciplinary moves it develops, which concepts it teaches, where it sits in the progression) and then choose the text that best serves those aims. Sometimes the answer is the obvious canonical choice. Sometimes the answer is a less obvious text that turns out to be a better fit. Either way, the text is in service of the curriculum design rather than the other way around.

This also makes the resourcing question more tractable. Knowing what a unit is meant to do clarifies what shared materials it needs: Knowledge organiser, key extracts, model paragraphs, the misconceptions document. If the unit's aims are vague, the resources tend to drift; if the aims are sharp, the resources fall into place.

Staff expertise matters in text selection, and a department that ignores its teachers' enthusiasms tends to produce worse teaching. A teacher who loves a particular text and lights up when teaching it will usually do better work than a teacher grudgingly delivering a text imposed from above.

At the same time, staff enthusiasm is not always a good guide to what should be on the curriculum. The text someone loved teaching in 2014 may not be the right choice for 2026, and 'we have always taught this' is a reason that benefits from interrogation. A useful frame is to ask which texts staff are advocating for and why, and to weigh those reasons against the cumulative aims of the curriculum. A text that no member of the department wants to teach is probably the wrong choice. A text that one member is passionate about is worth considering carefully, especially if their reasoning extends beyond 'I love it'.

Text lists, like the rest of the curriculum, benefit from a periodic review. The right cadence is probably annual at KS3 (where you have more flexibility and new staff can be a productive source of suggestions) and every three or four years at KS4 (where the specifications change less often and stability has value).

A structured review tends to work better than a casual conversation. Look at the assessment data alongside the text list. Look at which units consistently produce strong analytical writing and which ones limp. Look at the cumulative shape of what students are reading across five years and check it against the aims you wrote down at the start. Document the changes and the reasoning, so the next HoD inherits a coherent rationale rather than a list of titles.

Cognito's English content is built around the most commonly taught GCSE set texts, which can support whichever choices your department lands on. The texts that endure tend to be the ones the department keeps returning to, finding new questions to ask of them.