Cambridge International AS & A Level English - Literature (9695)

Cambridge International AS & A Level English - Literature, syllabus 9695, is an internationally-examined qualification set by Cambridge International Education — it is not an English A-level, and does not appear on Ofqual's regulated-qualifications register. Searchers commonly call it “CIE A-Level English Literature” after the awarding body's earlier name, Cambridge International Examinations. Even the awarding body's own materials cannot agree on one name for it, as the next section shows.

What Cambridge International AS & A Level English - Literature (9695) Actually Is

The full, official name is Cambridge International AS & A Level English - Literature (9695), set by Cambridge International Education, which the syllabus itself describes as “the name of our awarding body and a part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, which is a department of the University of Cambridge.”

Cambridge International's own materials do not agree on what to call this syllabus. The overview page linked above titles itself, and headlines itself, “Cambridge International AS & A Level English - Literature (9695)” — that is its page title and its H1 heading, word for word. But the same page's Important Notices section reads differently: “We are withdrawing Cambridge International AS & A Level Literature in English (9695) from the March exam series. The last March series for this syllabus will be March 2026. From 2027, we will only offer this syllabus in the June and November exam series.” The syllabus PDF itself settles on the second form too — its own cover reads “Cambridge International, AS & A Level, Literature in English 9695”. Two names, from two documents the awarding body itself controls, for one code. This page uses both, and says which document each comes from, rather than choosing one and hiding the other.

One further note from the syllabus PDF, worth stating plainly: a footnote clarifies that “for the purposes of screen readers, any mention in this document of Cambridge IGCSE refers to Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education” — not an English GCSE, a separate qualification family. And on the abbreviation people actually search for: checked directly against the syllabus overview page's full HTML, 532,000 bytes in total, the letters “CIE” do not appear on it anywhere — zero whole-word matches. “CIE” survives only as the term people search for, which is why we use it in this page's title, not because the awarding body still uses it.

This confusion is not confined to Cambridge International's own paperwork. It shows up in the search results for this exact term, too. One page currently ranking for this search titles itself as a Literature past-papers resource — but its own on-page heading, every one of its subheadings, and its own web address are entirely about the separate CIE English Language syllabus instead: a different qualification, with its own separate code, testing a different set of skills. A reader searching for Literature past papers can land on Language content instead, with nothing on that page correcting the mismatch. Getting the name right, in both directions, is the whole reason this page exists.

Absent From Ofqual's Register — But Not Entirely Absent From Ofqual

This qualification is also absent from UK regulation, in a specific and checkable sense. A search of Ofqual's Find a Regulated Qualification service for the awarding organisation “Cambridge International Education” returns 68 qualifications across five result pages. None of them is titled AS Level or A Level, and searched directly across all five pages, the digits 9695 do not appear on a single one: this qualification is not on the register. That is a different, narrower claim than saying the organisation itself returns no results at all — it does not, and this page does not pretend otherwise. The first results page alone includes at least one entry described as a “Pre-U Certificate”; this page has not classified all 68 rows and does not claim to. The only finding it relies on is that none of the 68 is this syllabus.

Cambridge International separately publishes its own benchmarking claim, and keeps it clearly apart from any Ofqual listing: “UK ENIC, the national agency in the UK for the recognition and comparison of international qualifications and skills, has carried out an independent benchmarking study of Cambridge International AS & A Level and found it to be comparable to the standard of AS & A Level in the UK,” the syllabus states. That is UK ENIC's benchmarking opinion, quoted directly from Cambridge International's own syllabus PDF — not an Ofqual regulatory listing, and this page keeps the two separate rather than treating a comparability opinion as if it were a register entry.

Three Assessment Routes, a March 2026 Cut-Off, and a Second Code Not to Confuse With This One

Candidates are not all working towards the same certificate. The syllabus sets out three routes: an AS Level taken alone, with all AS components sat in one exam series; an A Level staged over two years, with the AS papers taken in year one and the remaining papers completing the A Level in year two; and an A Level taken in one series, all four papers together. The route chosen changes what a transcript certifies, and the two levels use different grade scales: “candidates following an AS Level route are eligible for grades a-e,” while “candidates following an A Level route are eligible for grades A*-E.” A lower-case grade and an upper-case grade on this syllabus belong to two different routes, not two ends of one scale.

The exam calendar has changed too. The overview page states plainly that Cambridge International is withdrawing this syllabus “from the March exam series,” and that “the last March series for this syllabus will be March 2026,” with June and November the only series offered from 2027. Until then, the current 2024-2026 syllabus notes that a March sitting is “available for examination in March 2024, 2025 and 2026 for India only” — not a general option for UK-entered candidates even while it lasts.

There is also a second, related code worth knowing before searching further. The syllabus states that candidates “can take this syllabus alongside other syllabuses in a single exam series,” with two exceptions: “Cambridge International AS Level Language and Literature in English (8695)”, and “syllabuses with the same title at the same level.” 8695 is an AS-Level-only, related but different qualification from 9695, and the two are easy to conflate on the strength of the name alone.

Four Written Papers, No Coursework — and a Fifth Assessment Objective That Only Exists at A Level

Every component of this syllabus is an externally assessed written examination. There is no non-exam assessment and no coursework component anywhere in it.

The syllabus also uses five assessment objectives, not the three or four that govern other boards' English Literature specifications: AO1 (knowledge and understanding), AO2 (analysis), AO3 (personal response), AO4 (communication) and AO5 (evaluation of opinion). AO1 to AO4 are each worth 25% of the AS Level and 20% of the full A Level. AO5 is different in kind, not just in weighting: it is worth 0% of the AS Level and 20% of the A Level, assessed only in Papers 3 and 4 — the two papers that do not exist on the AS-only route at all. A candidate who takes only Papers 1 and 2 is never assessed against AO5, in any form.

Set Texts Rotate by Examination Year — the 2026 List Is Not the 2027 List

Unlike a fixed-canon subject, this syllabus tells centres directly that its texts move: “Set texts regularly rotate on the syllabus and may change from one year of examination to the next. Before you begin teaching, check the set text list for the year in which your candidates will take their examinations.” Two syllabus editions are published and current at once. The 2024-2026 syllabus covers examinations in 2024, 2025 and 2026; the 2027-2028 syllabus, already published, covers examinations in 2027 and 2028. A set-text list quoted without naming which of these two years it applies to is not reliably true of either.

Two of the four Section A Drama texts for examination in 2027 — Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Tempest — carry over from the 2026 list; Moon on a Rainbow Shawl and The Duchess of Malfi rotate out, replaced by The Rover and Barber Shop Chronicles. The 2027-2028 syllabus itself has already had one correction since first publication: its own update notice records that “a change has been made on page 29 to correct a typographical error in the title of a set text: Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories from Selected Stories” in the version published December 2024 — a small but genuine second edition of a syllabus that had only just been released.

Who Actually Sits This in the UK

We could not independently confirm how many UK schools currently teach Cambridge International English Literature, and this page does not estimate a figure it cannot source. What we can point to is one concrete, current example of UK delivery: Wolsey Hall, a UK-based Cambridge-registered distance-learning provider, which markets its Cambridge International AS & A Level English Literature (9695) course to schools “looking to expand subject choice, overcome staffing challenges, support small cohorts or provide greater flexibility for individual students” — not as a routine swap-in alternative to AQA, Edexcel, OCR or Eduqas English Literature, all of which our A-Level English Literature guide already covers.

The same provider's own course page states, in so many words: “Qualification: Cambridge International AS & A Level English Literature (9695). Awarding body: Cambridge International Education (CIE)” — using the abbreviation “CIE” even though, as above, it appears nowhere on Cambridge International's own syllabus page. That is exactly why the abbreviation survives: as third-party and marketing shorthand for an awarding body that has moved on from it in its own materials.

Cambridge International Education sits inside Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge — but the syllabus itself is a sixth-form qualification, not a university course, and Leading Tuition does not offer university-level tuition. Nothing on this page is an offer of undergraduate-level teaching, whatever the parent institution's name suggests.

How Leading Tuition Supports Cambridge International English Literature Students

We start from the syllabus code and the route a candidate is actually entered for — AS Level only, staged A Level, or linear A Level — because those are three different assessment journeys with three different session plans, not one course taught at different speeds. From there, every session is built against the correct edition: the 2024-2026 set-text list for a candidate examined up to and including 2026, or the 2027-2028 list for one examined from 2027 onward, since a syllabus that rotates its texts deliberately makes the wrong year a genuine mistake, not a cosmetic one.

The heaviest single piece of coaching is AO5, evaluation of opinion, because it is worth nothing at AS Level and a fifth of the full A Level, assessed only in Papers 3 and 4 — a skill a candidate on the AS-only route never meets and a candidate on the staged or linear route meets for the first time in year two. We teach it as a distinct skill from AO2's close textual analysis: evaluating how critics or other readers have argued about a text, not analysing the text alone. Alongside that, sessions are built around the specific set-text edition a student's own exam series requires, not a generic English Literature crammer built for a different board's specification.

Frequently Asked Questions — Cambridge International A-Level English Literature

Primary sources for this page: Cambridge International's own English - Literature 9695 syllabus page, the 2027-2028 syllabus PDF, the 2024-2026 syllabus PDF, the 2027-2028 syllabus update PDF, Ofqual's Find a Regulated Qualification register, and Wolsey Hall's course page for the UK-delivery example.

A note on verification. cambridgeinternational.org returns HTTP 500, not 404, for a plausible but nonexistent syllabus URL in the same /programmes-and-qualifications/ family as the real page — confirmed with an invented syllabus slug as a control, checked against the real 9695 page returning HTTP 200 in the same family, and against a plain nonexistent path elsewhere on the same host returning a genuine 404. The claim that “CIE” does not appear on the syllabus page was checked with a case-sensitive whole-word search of the full page, not assumed. The assessment-objective weighting table in the syllabus PDF renders out of row order under a straightforward text extraction; the AS Level and A Level percentages on this page were reconstructed from the PDF's own word-position data rather than trusted from a garbled linear extract. Every code, weighting, date and set text on this page was checked against the syllabus PDFs and the live syllabus page directly, in September 2026.