The 2000 AQA anthology covered four sections: poets in the English Literary Heritage, poems from other cultures and traditions, 20th-century prose, and 20th- or pre-20th-century poetry.[1]
The 2004 AQA Anthology was a collection of poems and short texts. The anthology was split into several sections covering poems from other cultures, the poetry of Seamus Heaney,[4]Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, and a bank of pre-1914 poems. There was also a section of prose pieces, which could have been studied in schools which had chosen not to study a separate set text.
GCSE English students studied all of the poems in either cluster and answered a question on them in Section A of Paper 2. In 2005, Andrew Cunningham, an English teacher at Charterhouse School complained in the Telegraph that the inclusion of the poems represented an "obsession with multi-culturalism".[5]
In 2008 the Anthology was reissued without "Education for Leisure" following complaints about its reference to knives and concerns about rising levels of knife crime in schools.[6] In the new Anthology the poem was replaced with a "This page is left intentionally blank" notice. After removing "Education for Leisure" from the anthology the exam board was accused of censorship.[7]
2010 Anthology
The fifth anthology was produced for first teaching in 2010.[8]
The anthology includes poems under the heading "Moon on the Tides" and prose under the heading "Sunlight on the Grass".[9] Some of the poems are by authors of poems in the first anthology such as Agard and Armitage.
The poetry anthology was divided into four clusters, titled "Character and voice",[10] "Place",[11] "Conflict",[12] and "Relationships".[13]
The newest edition of the anthology was produced for first teaching in 2015,[14][15] in line with the reformed GCSE English Literature qualification. The anthology includes poems under the title "Poems Past and Present", and prose under the title "Telling Tales".
The poetry anthology is divided into two clusters - "Love and Relationships" and "Power and Conflict".
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