Accolade Press’s new, comprehensive guide to KS3 Literature is your one-stop-shop for ensuring success in English at KS3 and beyond.

With a focus on teaching essay writing skills, this stimulating volume incrementally walks students through the building blocks required to fashion a perfect essay. Starting with the writing of analytical sentences centred around quotations and how we might stack them into paragraphs, it goes on to cover the art of invoking historical context, before finally demonstrating how to bring everything seamlessly together.

KS3 students are required to cover poetry, Shakespeare, drama and prose. Tackling each of these requirements in turn, this guide works with thought-provoking set texts that push students further. As such, not only is this an invaluable resource for KS3 students looking to prime themselves for the rigours of GCSE, but it is also doubles as a complete scheme of study for educators looking to build a syllabus.

Texts covered include:

An anthology of nature poems ranging from canonical Romantics (such as William Blake and William Wordsworth) to overlooked voices of the twentieth century (such as Hilda Doolittle and Amy Lowell). A selection of poems from the Harlem Renaissance (to exercise unseen poetry skills). Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (to cover twentieth century drama). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (to cover novels/prose).

Dr Anthony Walker-Cook received his PhD from UCL in 2021. Before that, he received his BA (First Class, 2016) and MA (Distinction, 2017) from Durham University. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has been a tutor for the past five years. He currently works in Higher Education alongside tutoring, continuing his research and writing articles about LEGO.