England’s biggest exam board is set to introduce more diverse texts from next September to allow pupils more access to a range of writers.
AQA will introduce three new texts and a poetry collection to its English literature course to improve the overall balance of ethnicity and gender of writers.
The three new texts students will be able to study are Chinonyerem Odimba‘s Princess & the Hustler, Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking and Kit de Waal’s My Name is Leon.
Princess & the Hustler is a play set in the context of the Bristol bus boycott; Leave Taking is inspired by a family member of the author’s who was part of the Windrush generation, and My Name is Leon is a coming-of-age novel about a boy who’s on a mission to reunite his family.
The new poetry cluster will be titled Worlds and Lives, including texts from William Wordsworth and Imtiaz Dharker.
Three existing texts have been removed, with AQA saying each accounts for less than 1 per cent of overall entries: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The History Boys by Alan Bennett and the play version of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Pauline McPartlan, AQA’s head of curriculum for English, said she was ”delighted to be announcing” the new texts “as part of AQA’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion in our English qualifications”.
She added: “As the largest awarding body for English, we have the greatest influence on what’s taught in the classroom. We want to make the right changes, so we’ve listened to teachers, consulted with external experts and academics, and worked with our senior examiners to inform the decisions we’ve made.
“We’re making these changes because it matters that current and future generations of young people have an opportunity to experience a diverse, balanced, inclusive English literature curriculum that resonates with their lives and better reflects modern Britain.”
AQA has said that all the current poetry clusters will remain available for study.
The exam board will provide resources for teachers to accompany the new texts, including free on-demand e-learning to provide a practical toolkit for preparation and teaching.
AQA has also established an equality, diversity and inclusion expert group to consider representation in the curriculum and assessment.
Earlier this year, AQA announced that it was updating its GCSE and A-level drama set texts to allow pupils more access to diverse writers.
