English Beyond the Mark Scheme

Designing curriculum for more than a grade

Emerging from the annual fog of mock exam-marking often leaves me wondering what we’re actually building toward in English. Assessment absolutely has its place, of course it does, but the gravitational pull of exams shapes far more of our curriculum than we often admit. By January, classrooms contort around timing drills, confidence gaps, and rubrics at the expense of all else.

But schools push huge numbers of students through exams that aren’t always in their best interests and don’t necessarily demonstrate their actual aptitude for English. The question, then, is not whether exams matter. They clearly do. It is what happens when they become the organising principle of every year that leads up to them. What would an English curriculum look like if it was not reverse-engineered from an exam paper?

Right now, IGCSE terrain is narrow. Edexcel hasn’t updated its Literature core texts in years. CIE rotates texts every three years, which is at least something, but the lists rarely feature Southeast Asian authors unless you count the occasional anthology poem. Writers of the Global North dominate. It’s predictable and a refresh is long overdue.This is not an argument against exams so much as a caution against letting them dictate the shape of every key stage.

Creativity and experimentation tend to be protected at KS3. Then, somewhere around the end of Year 9, or partway through Year 10 if we’re lucky, the door is quietly closed on joy and the era of exam skills is ushered in. From that point onwards, curriculum pacing is often dictated by what can realistically be distilled and produced in a two-hour written paper. Not enough time to cover what we’d like to teach or the broader experience of the subject; too much time honing the exam behaviours that aren’t really about becoming a better reader or writer at all, but about signalling to an examiner that you can produce the required performance on demand. The course is flattened into the transactional.

That said, KS4 does not have to be a curricular wasteland. Even within exam constraints, schools still make meaningful choices. Which texts are prioritised and which ideas are foregrounded. Whether skills are taught in isolation or as part of a coherent intellectual journey. Exams may set the destination, but they do not need to dictate every step of the route

So what’s the alternative?

Curriculum shaped by context, not by exam boards

Imagine if schools were trusted to develop their own specifications - designed around their context, their students, their cultural environment, and their values. Assessment could be built around authentic outcomes rather than external rubrics. Success might look like:

• long-term literary projects based on areas of genuine interest

• portfolios demonstrating analysis, creativity, and comparison over time

• collaborative outcomes where students co-design questions with teacher guidance

• digital or handwritten submissions, depending on need and an ethical AI use policy

• research-led inquiry units that connect literature with culture, history, or identity

  
  

Students could define outcomes, with teachers ensuring rigour. Universities already accept portfolios in other creative subjects; there’s no reason English couldn’t move in a similar direction.

Of course, this comes with challenges: maintaining engagement, ensuring regular extended writing, hitting milestones without the looming spectre of timed conditions. But these are pedagogical problems, not reasons to dismiss.

Sound familiar? Yes, there are echoes of the IB Middle Years Programme here. The MYP works towards a more holistic, conceptual model of English. Even there, however, students don’t always understand how they’re being assessed, and schools with varied linguistic profiles have to carefully scaffold the conceptual frameworks it relies on. Research from Australia similarly highlights the complexity of integrating frameworks like this into existing national curricula.

International schools, however, often have more freedom to innovate, even if that freedom sits alongside its own pressures. Parent expectations. Inspection frameworks. League-table anxiety. Used thoughtfully, though, it creates space for more intentional curriculum design.

At KS3, we’ve already begun moving in this direction. Our English curriculum is concept-based, thematic, and deliberately built for our cohort. Year 7 explores Self & Identity, Year 8 moves into Self, Others & Conflict, and Year 9 broadens out to Self & Society. The curriculum takes the strongest elements of knowledge-rich approaches (clear sequencing, content, explicit instruction) and blends them with principles of creativity, authenticity and reflection, while steering clear of pseudoscience.

In practice, this has led to sustained discussion that develops across units rather than sitting within isolated lessons. Students are encouraged to transfer learning across sequences, revisiting ideas, vocabulary and concepts over time. We have also begun experimenting with multimodal portfolios that promote student ownership through curation and reflection. Together, these approaches have resulted in stronger extended writing and a clearer sense of purpose for students than when units were driven primarily by assessment objectives.

So what could this look like in practice?

If English were not exam-driven, you could build a curriculum around:

• The History of English (identity, power, etymology) inspired by David Didau’s excellent book, Making Meaning in English.

• Imagery & Poetry (visual thinking, symbolism, spoken word)

• Children’s Literature & Storytelling (narrative craft, culture, empathy)

• Gothic, Urban Legends, and Internet Myths (genre, fear, folklore, digital narratives)

• Literary Movements Through Student Research (Romanticism, Modernism, Beat poets…)

• Literature & Rebellion (subversion, protest writing, banned books)

• Prose, Persuasion & Rhetoric (classical rhetoric to contemporary media bias)

  
  

In other words: a curriculum that helps students understand the world, not just attain a strong grade.