Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Public domain — linked to Poetry Foundation in the PDF.
Free teacher edition · 15-page PDF · AQA GCSE
Three lessons that span the Power and Conflict cluster.
Ozymandias, London, and Storm on the Island — chosen because together they cover the cluster's full range: monumental authority, embedded system, non-human force. Each lesson ships with a do-now, a modelled analysis, an independent task, a printable handout, and an exit ticket.
AO1 · AO2 · AO33 lessons50–60 min each
Exam board
AQA GCSE
Cluster
Power and Conflict
Format
3 lessons · 15 pp
Poem texts
2 public-domain (linked); 1 in copyright (via your anthology).
The three anchor poems
One poem per lesson. Three readings of what power even is.
London
William Blake
Public domain — linked to Poetry Foundation in the PDF.
Storm on the Island
Seamus Heaney
In copyright — distribute via your AQA anthology.
The PDF does not reproduce the poems. Public-domain texts are linked to Poetry Foundation; Heaney's poem should be distributed via your AQA anthology or a licensed reproduction.
What's inside
Fifteen pages of teaching-grade material.
One worked lesson per poem, the printable handouts that go with them, and a comparison page that teaches the exam-paper question directly.
01
Three lesson plans
One per anchor poem. Each lesson runs 50-60 minutes and follows the same three-phase shape — do-now, modelled analysis, independent task — with the AQA Assessment Objective made explicit for each phase.
02
Printable student handouts
One handout per poem. Five annotation prompts plus an exit ticket with three sentence-starters. Designed to be photocopied; the licensed poem text is meant to sit alongside.
03
Cross-poem comparison page
A three-axis scaffold (who holds power, where conflict comes from, the speaker's distance) and a 250-350 word comparison-paragraph template for the exam-paper question.
04
Teacher moves
Short callouts inside the modelled-analysis sections — what to model live, what to resist analysing, where to make the AO target explicit. The bits that usually live in margin notes after a fifth read.
We wrote this for three teachers in particular.
First-year GCSE English teachers
If you have not yet taught the AQA Power and Conflict cluster, the lesson plans give you a worked sequence — done-by-someone-who-has-taught-it — for the three poems that are most likely to anchor your unit.
Department leads sequencing the cluster
The three poems span the cluster's full conceptual range — monumental tyrant, embedded system, non-human force. Drop the lessons into your scheme of work as the first or last week, then use the comparison page to teach the exam-paper question.
Teachers cycling back to refresh a unit
Drop in just the comparison page as a department-wide rubric for the AQA comparison question. It works without the rest of the unit.
The questions teachers ask first
Do I need to give my email to download this?
No. The pack is a direct, open download — no email capture, no registration, no follow-up sequence. Share the URL with your whole department.
Are the poems printed inside the PDF?
No. The pack analyses each poem by its craft moves. Ozymandias and London are public domain and linked to Poetry Foundation; Storm on the Island is in copyright, so distribute its text via your AQA anthology or a licensed reproduction.
Can I use just one lesson or the comparison page?
Yes. Each lesson is self-contained, and the cross-poem comparison page works on its own as a department-wide rubric for the AQA comparison question.
Is this an official AQA resource?
No. It is a teaching artifact built by Storgy's editorial team, written against the AQA Power and Conflict specification. Storgy is not affiliated with AQA.
Want the same depth on every poem?
Teacher Pro covers all 15 Power and Conflict poems.
Every poem in the cluster has the same editorial depth as the three in this pack — line-by-line analysis, AO-aligned scoring callouts, printable handouts. Teacher Pro is the same pipeline applied at scale across AQA, Eduqas, and AP Lit.
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