The cornerstone of any English curriculum is the text. Through reading, students encounter the ways writers across history have captured the human experience: triumph and tragedy, suffering and loss, pride, humility, and identity. We want our students to hear diverse voices, make meaningful connections with what they read, and ultimately, to love English. 

Alongside this, we want them to develop fluency in reading, a confident command of written English, and assurance in their spoken language. Our aim is for students to leave school empowered by the literature they have studied, able to articulate their own ideas clearly, and confident in the linguistic skills needed to communicate them. 

Choosing the right texts for a secondary English curriculum is therefore vital – and complex. If we want our curriculum to meet these aspirations, text selection must be thoughtful, principled, and responsive. 

Curricular Aims 

The texts chosen for classroom study must clearly support the intended aims of the curriculum. Achieving this requires breadth – exposing students to a wide range of genres, forms, and purposes – and depth, ensuring that students encounter complete, high-quality texts rich in vocabulary, literary devices, and structural methods. 

Any curriculum must also align with the National Curriculum English Programmes of Study, which specify the range of texts and traditions students should encounter. 

Within the Key Stage 3 United Curriculum for English, we have worked carefully to balance breadth and depth. Students study historical and contemporary novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and non-fiction prose, and explore selected genres in depth. For example, Year 7 students study the adventure Bildungsroman through classic and contemporary narratives, enabling them to recognise recurring conventions while analysing how writers adapt the form over time. 

Engagement and Academic Rigour 

Engagement is essential in text selection. Students should enjoy what they read and feel inspired by the subject of English. For this reason, our curriculum incorporates texts that provide exciting, intriguing, or emotionally resonant reading experiences. 

Yet engagement alone is not enough. Text choices must also offer academic challenge and cultural capital. Texts should broaden students’ perspectives, introduce them to new or unfamiliar worlds, and expose them to a range of literary traditions and techniques. They must also extend students’ reading ability through ambitious vocabulary, complex ideas, and varied sentence constructions. 

The Key Stage 3 United Curriculum for English provides this balance by pairing classic works, such as R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with contemporary fiction, such as Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Girl of Ink and Stars. Across the curriculum, students explore seven unifying themes – power and conflict; inequality and social justice; gender; exploring the past; imagined worlds; personal perspectives; and childhood – ensuring a rich and varied foundation of literary knowledge. 

Diversity and Inclusion 

A well-designed English curriculum must reflect the diversity of the students who study it. This means including writers of different genders, cultural backgrounds, and experiences, as well as a range of global and British voices. 

Students should have access to texts that offer both mirrors – opportunities to see themselves and their communities reflected – and windows into lives, cultures, and viewpoints different from their own (1). Positive representation is crucial: every student deserves the experience of encountering a role model in the literature they study. 

The United Curriculum for English has been reviewed to ensure it is inclusive, representative, and grounded in the principle that diversity in literature strengthens both understanding and engagement. 

Implementation Challenges 

Leaders of English work within many constraints when selecting texts. The desire for a broad, balanced, and engaging curriculum must be weighed against practical factors such as curriculum time, exam board specifications, staff expertise, school budgets, and stock availability. 

Despite these challenges, student need must come first. Texts should be chosen because they enrich learning, not simply because they already exist in the stock cupboard. 

The Key Stage 3 United Curriculum helps mitigate some of these barriers by providing printable anthologies for poetry, short stories, and non-fiction units, and by offering abridged versions of selected texts. These adaptations preserve essential learning while supporting schools with limited time or resources. 

We also welcome recent exam board expansions to Key Stage 4 text choices and look forward to revisiting our Key Stage 4 curriculum to ensure it remains rigorous, inclusive, and supportive. 

Responding to Change  

A curriculum can only remain effective if it evolves. Text choices must be reviewed regularly to ensure they continue to meet students’ needs and reflect the shifting landscape of education and society. 

The independent Curriculum and Assessment Review, and the government’s response published in November 2025, both highlight the need to strengthen media literacy within English. They recommend equipping students to critically engage with messages across diverse media channels and extending programmes of study to include ‘transient texts,’ which reflect the rapidly changing communicative forms young people encounter (2). 

In response, we will work with schools to update the United Curriculum in line with the Review’s recommendations and any forthcoming statutory programmes of study. 

Selecting texts for a secondary English curriculum is both a challenge and an opportunity. The texts we choose shape students’ understanding of language, literature, and the world around them. By building a curriculum that balances breadth with depth, engagement with academic rigour, and diversity with inclusivity, we give every student the chance to become a confident, thoughtful reader and communicator. As the educational landscape evolves, so must our curriculum – ensuring that what we teach remains relevant, inspiring, and rooted in the needs of young people. Above all, our commitment remains the same: to provide rich, meaningful encounters with literature that stay with students long after they leave the classroom. 

Rikki Gould 

English Curriculum Writer – Secondary