The year 7 curriculum is thematic with compulsory elements and writers enabling students in every unit to cover a range of poetry, prose, non-fiction, film and media and creative writing elements. This allows for challenging texts to be interspersed with more modern texts and creative and light-hearted tasks. Year 8 is largely era-based units allowing a more stringent exploration of the English Literary canon. Year 9 brings in new texts and extracts and reflects and mirrors the GCSE skills (as does much of key stage 3) and ensures they have a good grounding in GCSE requirements without pulling students into an arduous three-year GCSE.