19 days. Four English exams. Here’s what you do first.

Literature Paper 1 is on 11 May. That is in less than three weeks. And before you spiral, I want to say something that I genuinely mean: three weeks is actually enough time to move up a whole grade boundary, if you use it properly. I’ve seen it happen, more times than I can count.

But the word “properly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, so let’s talk about what that actually means.

The biggest mistake I see students make right now, at this exact point in the revision calendar, is treating all four English papers as one big undifferentiated blob of panic. They’re not. They have different demands, different timings, and different memory requirements. So the first thing to do is to be brutally honest with yourself about the order.

Literature Paper 1 comes first (11 May). That’s Shakespeare and your 19th century novel — either A Christmas Carol, Jekyll and Hyde, or The Merchant of Venice. This paper is 1 hour 45 minutes, 64 marks, and it requires you to move from an extract into the wider text fluently. You need quotes in your head. Not twenty of them. About ten per text, chosen well, that you can drop into any question they throw at you.

Literature Paper 2 is 19 May. That’s your modern text (An Inspector Calls, for most of you), your Power & Conflict or Love & Relationships poems, and unseen poetry. It’s the longest exam you’ll sit (2 hours 15 minutes) and it is genuinely a test of stamina as much as knowledge.

Language papers come after that, on 21 May and early June. And here’s the thing about Language: it is a skill, not a content subject. You cannot “learn” Language the way you learn Literature. You practise it, and you get better.

So for this week? Eyes on Literature Paper 1. Get your Shakespeare quotes sorted. Write one timed essay on your Victorian text. If you want support doing that in a structured environment, our final Literature masterclass is happening soon on .

If you want to actually do that properly I’m running last-minute Literature classes on the first week of May at 5pm - 6pm where we go through each text properly and I show you exactly how to answer the exam.

• Monday 4th May - Macbeth

• Tuesday 5th May - A Christmas Carol

• Wednesday 6th May - An Inspector Calls

• Thursday 7th May - Power & Conflict Poetry

• Friday 8th May - Unseen Poetry

In each class, we go through how to answer a GCSE exam question, how to write a Grade 9 GCSE essay, and recap key context and themes, plus how to include them in your exam . You’ll also get predictions, a prediction table, and a cheat sheet with the key quotes and themes because at this stage, you shouldn’t be re-reading the text, you should be refining what you already know.

If you want to go into this exam knowing what you’re doing, join here:
https://www.firstratetutors.com/literature 

Three weeks is not nothing. Let’s go.

xxx
Barbara