Before You Were Mine

On the year-1 roadmap. Editorial work hasn't started yet — vote to push it up the queue.

About the AQA curriculum

AQA's GCSE English Literature specification (8702) is taken by the largest single group of UK Year 10 and 11 students — over 350,000 in a typical exam series. The Literature paper structure is two papers: Paper 1 covers Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century novel; Paper 2 covers modern texts, the AQA poetry anthology, and unseen poetry. The anthology splits into three named clusters: Power and Conflict (canonical war and authority poems, Ozymandias through Kamikaze), Love and Relationships (Byron, Browning, Hardy, Heaney, Duffy, Armitage), and the newer Worlds and Lives cluster introduced for first examination 2025. Schools choose one cluster per cohort. The unseen-poetry component asks students to write a comparison between two previously-unseen poems under timed conditions, and is consistently where mid- and bottom-band students lose marks. Storgy's AQA coverage gives every anthology poem its own page — close-reading, rhyme and meter overlays where the form rewards them, mark-scheme-aligned model paragraphs, and a free downloadable teacher edition handout with annotation margins built for the AQA AOs. The Worlds and Lives cluster is the focus of our 2026 catalogue work because it's the cluster departments are actively re-resourcing right now. Every page is print-ready, annotation-friendly, and refuses to recycle the same Mr Bruff line a Year 10 has already watched on TikTok.