Five, Then the Rest

In June 2023, GCSE students turned to the poetry section of their English Literature exam. Those sitting AQA’s paper found a list headed “The poems you have studied are:”, with fifteen titles under it. Those sitting the Eduqas paper found the same heading above eighteen titles. On both papers, only one poem from the list was printed in full, and the exam board had chosen which one.^[1][2]

AQA’s question read like this.^[1]

“Compare how poets present the effects of power in ‘My Last Duchess’ and in one other poem from ‘Power and conflict’.”

Eduqas printed William Blake’s London and then asked its students to “Choose one other poem from the anthology” to compare with it.^[2]

In both exams, the second poem was not on the paper at all. Each student had to choose it from the list and write about it from memory.

Other boards set the question differently, and we look at each of them below. On every board we checked, though, the exam board picks at least one of the poems, from anywhere in the collection.

So how many poems does a student really need to learn? You may have heard that the answer is very few: learn two or three poems well, perhaps four, because the named poem is printed for you anyway and you only need to bring the second one with you.

Suppose your child has followed that advice and learned four poems. They open the paper, and the poem printed on it is one of the others. They can read it, because every word is there on the page. What they do not have is what studying the poem would have given them: who is speaking, when it was written, what the poet was arguing against, and why the poem has the shape it has. All of that has to be worked out for the first time, in the exam hall, before the comparison can even begin.

Having the poem printed sounds like help. We think it is the riskiest part of the question, and the boards’ own mark schemes show why.

What the printed page leaves out

Is a poem you can read the same as a poem you know? The GCSE papers set by AQA and Edexcel give a useful answer, because each of them contains both kinds of question.

On both papers, one section gives students poems they have never seen before. That section is marked on two assessment objectives only, AO1 and AO2, which broadly cover reading the poem and analysing how it is written.^[3][4] The anthology question adds a third, AO3, which rewards an understanding of the poem’s context. It carries six of AQA’s thirty marks and five of Edexcel’s twenty.^[3][4] Eduqas gives AO3 the same weight as AO1 and AO2 in both of its anthology questions.^[5] CCEA’s anthology question tells students to “include relevant contextual material.”^[6]

At the top level, AQA describes what it wants for AO3 as “Exploration of ideas/perspectives/contextual factors shown by specific, detailed links between context/text/task.”^[3]

We read that as a clear signal. In the anthology question, the printed poem is meant to be one the student already knows: its poet, its period and its purpose. The words on the page supply none of the three.

The same mark schemes also warn against relying only on the poem the student chose. AQA lists a “response to named poem and one other from the named cluster” as a “defining feature” of the task, and an answer that misses it “could, as referenced in the mark scheme, be ‘capped’ at the top of Level 2”, on a mark scheme where the top level is Level 6.^[3] Edexcel says that answers which are “considerably unbalanced will not be able to access Level 3”.^[4] We think the student who has learned only a few poems is the one most tempted to rely on them, writing a great deal about the poem they chose and very little about the poem they were given.

So the obvious fix, learning fewer poems more deeply, does something strange. It makes a student strongest on the poem they get to choose, and weakest on the poem that is certain to be on the page.

Printed for you, or chosen by you

In England, the Department for Education requires every GCSE poetry selection to hold at least fifteen poems by at least five different poets.^[7] Here is what each board’s papers ask your child to do with those poems.

AQA GCSE: each cluster has fifteen poems, and the question prints one of them and asks for a second poem from the same cluster, written about from memory.^[1]

Edexcel GCSE: each collection has fifteen poems, and the question prints one of them and asks your child to choose a second poem from the same collection and write about it from memory.^[4]

Eduqas GCSE: the anthology on the 2023 paper has eighteen poems, and the new anthology, first examined in 2027, has fifteen. One question is on a printed poem by itself, and the next compares it with a poem your child chooses and writes about from memory.^[2][5]

OCR GCSE: each cluster has fifteen poems, and the first question prints one of them beside a poem your child has never seen. The second part of the question asks for another poem from the cluster, written about from memory.^[8]

CCEA GCSE: each anthology has fifteen poems, and students bring a copy with no notes in it into the exam. The question still names one poem for your child, who then chooses the second.^[6]

Edexcel International GCSE: the poetry part of the anthology has sixteen poems, printed in a booklet that comes with the paper. One question names two poems, and the other names one poem and lets your child choose the second.^[9]

Cambridge IGCSE: each set of poems, such as the fifteen chosen from Songs of Ourselves, gets two questions on each paper. Each question prints a single poem, and your child answers one of the two.^[10]

On the CCEA, Edexcel International and Cambridge papers, nothing has to be written from memory. We think the same risk applies there, for a simple reason. A poem your child has never studied still has to be understood, explained and often compared in an hour or less, and on those boards the exam board still decides which poems appear.

Five poems, known well

How many is enough, then? In our experience, about five poems known well is the minimum, and students who know five well have generally done well in this question. That is a pattern we have seen rather than a promise. Learning fewer does not guarantee a poor result, and learning more does not guarantee a good one. But any poem in the collection could be the one the board chooses. The aim has to be all of them.

By “known well” we mean that your child could write the eight notes described in the next section from memory, quotations included, for each of those five poems.

Does that mean fifteen or more poems studied as deeply as a novel? It does not. A novel or a play fills a whole essay by itself, so our students take each set text slowly, one part at a time. A collection of fifteen poems or more cannot be opened up like that. For this question, the poems do not need to be.

Eight short notes on every poem

For every poem in the collection, our students make the same eight short notes, each with one to three quotations from the poem underneath it:

1. The speaker: who is talking, and what kind of human experience that voice stands for.

2. The context: when and where the poem was written, and what was happening in that world.

3. The form: what kind of poem it is, and why the poet might have chosen that shape.

4. The structure and language: the few features that matter most, such as the rhyme, the line breaks or a key image.

5. The themes: the main idea the poem explores, and how that idea changes from the first line to the last.

6. The poet’s purpose: what the poet wanted to do to the reader, whether that was to warn, to protest or to remember.

7. The message: one sentence saying what this particular poem argues that the others in the collection do not.

8. The comparisons: the other poems in the collection it pairs with well, and the reason for each pairing.

Each note starts with the idea, written in the student’s own words, and the quotations come after it as evidence. For the speaker, the form, the structure and the themes, the student also writes down what that choice makes a reader feel and think.

Eight notes is not a great deal of writing for one poem. Look at the list again, though. It holds almost exactly what the printed page leaves out: the voice, the poet’s world, the reason for the shape, what the poet wanted, and which other poems it pairs with.

The last note does a special job on the boards that ask for a comparison. Because every poem’s notes already name its best partners, a student who meets any poem on the page has already thought about the question the board is about to ask, which is what to compare it with and why.

We work through a collection of fifteen in five sittings, with three poems at each sitting. After the fifth, there is no poem in the collection that a student is meeting for the first time.

Five, then the rest

If your child is starting late, or the anthology feels too big, this is the order we would suggest. First learn five poems well, choosing ones that differ from each other in theme and method, so that at least one of them makes a strong partner for almost any poem the board could print. Then make the eight short notes on every other poem in the collection, so that whichever poem is printed, your child has met it before.

The five well-known poems are the ones your child will choose to write about. The short notes on the whole collection are there for the poem your child does not get to choose.

Four things to do this week

1. Read the list of titles aloud together. For each title, ask your child who is speaking in that poem and what the poet wanted. Any poem they cannot talk about is the next one to cover.

2. Pick a poem your child has not studied and ask the exam’s question about it. Ask which poem they would compare it with, and why. A quick answer with a reason means that pairing is ready, and a long silence means it is not.

3. Make the eight notes for one new poem. Write the idea first and one to three quotations under it. Use the list above as the headings, and stop once all eight are filled in.

4. Plan the rest in threes, and spread the sittings out. Three poems at a sitting covers a collection of fifteen in five sittings. Practice spread out over time is remembered better than the same practice done in one block.^[11]

If you would like to know where your child stands in English now, our free assessment takes five minutes.

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