GCSE English Literature course to include novels about refugees and teenage fathers

Gritty tales of refugees and teenage fathers will be taught alongside classics such as Lord Of The Flies and Animal Farm in a bid to ‘improve diversity’ in an English literature GCSE.

Students will now rely on LitPriest more than ever before as a study guide for English literature,  poetry, essays, short stories, and plays.

Contemporary titles including Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy and Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry have been added to exam board Edexcel’s approved text list.

Awarding body Pearson, which owns Edexcel, said the list has been extended ‘in response to student and teacher feedback around the lack of diversity of British texts’.

Two extra novels, two extra plays and another poetry collection will now be available for teenagers to study at GCSE.

Katy Lewis, head of English, Drama and Languages at Pearson said she wanted to ensure that students are being exposed to literature ‘from a variety of British authors from different backgrounds’.

She said they should be ‘reading about contemporary issues that they can engage with and relate to’.

Contemporary titles including Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy and Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry have been added to exam board Edexcel’s approved text list. A stock photo is used above [File photo]

She added: ‘Diversity, inclusion and belonging matter. They matter in the literature we consume and the books, poetry and plays we put in front of our young people.

‘The impact of this can last a lifetime. Young people should feel represented in the literature they read and by the authors who write for them, which is why we are incredibly proud to have been the first awarding organisation to add these diverse texts.’

Poetry collection Belonging brings together Amy Blakemore’s Peckham Rye Lane, Grace Nichols’s Island Man, Imtiaz Dharker’s In Wales, Wanting To Be Italian and Raymond Antrobus’s Jamaican British with the works of Emily Bronte, John Keats and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The new novels are Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin and Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry, while the plays are The Empress by Tanika Gupta and Refugee Boy, adapted from Zephaniah’s novel for the stage by Lemn Sissay.

They join traditional texts such as An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley and The Woman In Black by Susan Hill.

Boys Don’t Cry is a 2010 novel, which explores the experience of teenager who becomes a father.

Awarding body Pearson, which owns Edexcel, said the list has been extended ‘in response to student and teacher feedback around the lack of diversity of British texts’ [File photo]

Coram Boy was published in 2000 and features children being sold into military service or slavery in 18-century England.

The Empress depicts the relationship between Queen Victoria, one of her servants, Abdul Karim, and an Indian nanny.

Refugee Boy is about a 14-year-old sent to England to escape the Ethiopia–Eritrea conflict of the 1990s.

The texts will be available for teaching from September, with the first examinations taking place in 2021.