Welcome to St Paul's Girls' School — St Paul's Girls' School

Year 7

Exploring cultural identity using a range of poems and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett; introduction to genre; individual novel-reading projects; beginning Shakespeare with a text like The Tempest; writing fiction, poetry and formal pieces such as letters and book reviews; elementary grammar, paragraphing and basic punctuation; giving a class presentation.

Year 8

Politics and rhetoric, using Julius Caesar and Animal Farm as core texts; women's writing based on a study of Jane Eyre and an anthology of poems written by women; "Town and country" - a poetry anthology; a project on a chosen poet; grammar; formal comparative essays and summaries; discussion, play reading, creative writing and personal reflection.

Year 9

Shakespeare in performance (Othello); war (using a range of literary and non literary materials); "growing up" (a rites of passage novel like The Go-Between or A Room with a View); more advanced summaries; media texts; analytical and creative writing and discussing; students choose a novel for independent study and comparison with the set text.

Year 10

A Shakespeare play; a 20th century poet; a 20th century novel; several poets from before the 20th century; media texts. Coursework involves writing about some of the texts we’ve studied, as well as an oral performance and a piece of creative writing.

Year 11

Northanger Abbey and a play by Samuel Beckett; summaries; media texts; and the sort of informative, persuasive and analytical writing that comes up in the summer exam.

Year 12

The AS course begins with a study of Charles Dickens and twentieth-century poets. Coursework will involve a comparison of Our Mutual Friend and Oliver Twist and the poets will appear on the exam paper. Later in the year, we study Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and a range of poets and short story writers. A piece of creative writing and an analytical commentary on it complete the coursework folder.

Year 13

Students prepare for a 3,000-word coursework essay by studying The Merchant's Tale, Middlemarch and a third text they choose themselves. We will also study King Lear, Oedipus Rex and Book IX of Paradise Lost, plus studying poetic form in different periods as preparation for writing on an unseen poem in the exam.