English (A Level)

Edexcel English Language & Literature has been selected as the best choice for the English A-Level. This decision was driven by the core characteristics within this course which are the quest to understand ‘voice’ and the study of texts that ask the question ‘what does it mean to cross boundaries?’. 

LSA students are encouraged to explore their own voice as a storyteller and asked to consider what qualities your own ‘voice’ might hold. This will enable them to create interesting and innovative screen content and participate in the wider world as strong and confident communicators. 

The inclusion of ‘unseen’ material on the course curriculum offers an excellent opportunity to include a wide range of rigorous, exciting and important texts from a wide-ranging English canon that reflect the multiplicity of English texts ensuring a range of authors diverse in social class, culture, ethnicity and experience can be studied. This approach to the course also helps promote the fundamental British Values that are important to our ethos and teaching. 

As part of their studies students study one whole play and we have selected ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. This choice will enable students to consider important and current issues such as societal attitudes towards gender, masculinity, race and class.

They will explore the impact of Capitalism and what happens when culture, populations and viewpoints clash. For the second exam students will study texts selected under the thematic concern of ‘Crossing Boundaries’.

As students of storytelling they will be invited how they will cross boundaries as storytellers and how their own creations may indeed adhere to or reject conventions within storytelling. As part of this study they will read a wide range of non-fiction that explores the idea of ‘crossing boundaries’.

These boundaries are both real and imagined, physical and metaphorical, metaphysical as well as moral. We have selected two exciting set texts that will be studied in comparison ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys and ‘North’ by Seamus Heaney’.

These texts, even in their diversity, offer fantastic comparisons of extremely important historical contexts and movements in literature.