The six 19th-century prose texts OCR’s own specification names, immediately above a sentence that still calls them five — plus every set text and anthology poem OCR has swapped since 2018.
Book a Free ConsultationOCR GCSE English Literature is Cambridge OCR’s GCSE (9-1) specification for English Literature, coded J352 (Ofqual QN 601/4872/X) and set out in Version 3.0, published November 2025. It is the only GCSE English Literature specification OCR offers — unlike OCR GCSE History, which runs History A and History B side by side. Two closed text components, 80 marks each, examine four categories of set text between them: modern prose or drama, 19th-century prose, Shakespeare and poetry.
Our expert OCR GCSE English Literature tutors build every programme around Component 01’s modern-and-19th-century pairing and Component 02’s poetry-and-Shakespeare pairing — not a generic revision course written for a different board.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppOCR's Component 01 lists six 19th-century prose texts a school can choose from: Great Expectations (Charles Dickens), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), The War of the Worlds (H G Wells), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) and A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens). The list is printed as a single bulleted table cell in OCR's own specification document, all six present together.
Immediately beneath that list, the same document describes the choice differently: “Centres study one set text from the five 19th century prose set texts that include a range of classics.” Six texts are named above a sentence that calls them five. This is not a formatting artefact: rendering the specification's page as an image puts the bulleted list and the describing sentence in the same visual block, ruling out a column-merging error in the text extraction.
The specification's own Summary of Updates explains how the mismatch happened, without excusing it. A Christmas Carol was added to the list in August 2018, recorded in the update log as version 2.2: “Addition of A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens.” The sentence counting the list was never revised to match. A third-party revision platform, Atom Learning, lists the identical six texts and correctly counts them as six — OCR's own document is less internally consistent on this point than a commercial revision guide describing the same specification.
For a family checking a school's chosen text against an older resource, all six names above are what to look for on OCR's Component 01 — not five.
Component 01's other pairing is a modern prose or drama text, chosen from six: Anita and Me (Meera Syal), Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro), Animal Farm (George Orwell), An Inspector Calls (J. B. Priestley), DNA (Dennis Kelly) and Leave Taking (Winsome Pinnock). Leave Taking is the newest addition, entered the specification in September 2022 under update 2.5, with its first assessment series in June 2024.
Leave Taking replaced My Mother Said I Never Should, by Charlotte Keatley. OCR's Summary of Updates records the removal directly: “Removal of text 'My Mother said I never should' by Charlotte Keatley as the final assessment series (June 2023) has now passed,” logged as version 2.6 in August 2023. A family working from a revision guide or an older sibling's notes that still lists My Mother Said I Never Should is holding a text OCR has not examined since June 2023.
A student taking OCR GCSE English Literature is very often taking OCR GCSE English Language alongside it, on the same J-coded family of specifications but assessed entirely separately.
OCR's Component 02 pairs Shakespeare with poetry, and the Shakespeare choice is drawn from four plays: Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing. What the specification adds, and what a set-text list alone will not tell a family, is which edition OCR's own exam papers quote from when a question prints an extract: “Where an extract is printed on the question paper it will be taken from the The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text (Collins Classics).”
Centres are not required to teach from that edition — the specification is explicit that “centres are free to use any edition of their chosen Shakespeare text but should avoid using heavily edited editions.” The distinction matters for exam technique: a student preparing from a heavily annotated school edition, with modernised stage directions or renumbered lines, may find the printed extract in the exam does not match the text they have been revising line for line.
Our OCR GCSE English Literature tutors work from the exact edition and set texts your child’s school has chosen — not a generic set-text crib written for whichever board is easiest to summarise.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppOCR's Component 02 also examines poetry, chosen from OCR's own anthology, Towards a World Unknown: “a choice of three poetry clusters for study, each comprising fifteen poems since 1789.” The three clusters are Love and Relationships, Conflict, and Youth and Age.
OCR replaced five poems in each of the three clusters for first teaching September 2022, with first assessment in summer 2024 — fifteen new poems across the anthology, named individually on OCR's own teaching site. In Love and Relationships: “Flirtation” (Rita Dove), “Poem for my Love” (June Jordan), “Lullaby” (Fatimah Asghar), “The Perseverance” (Raymond Antrobus) and “Looking at Your Hands” (Martin Carter). In Conflict: “Papa-T” (Fred D'Aguiar), “Songs for the People” (Frances E. W. Harper), “We Lived Happily during the War” (Ilya Kaminsky), “Colonization in Reverse” (Louise Bennett) and “Thirteen” (Caleb Femi). In Youth and Age: “Equilibrium” (Theresa Lola), “Prayer” (Zaffar Kunial), “Happy Birthday Moon” (Raymond Antrobus), “Tea With Our Grandmothers” (Warsan Shire) and “Theme for English B” (Langston Hughes).
Five poems out of fifteen is one third of each cluster. A student whose older sibling sat OCR GCSE English Literature before September 2022 studied a genuinely different anthology under the same cluster name — the cluster titles have not changed, but a third of the poems inside each one have.
OCR publishes combined assessment-objective weightings for the whole qualification — AO1 40%, AO2 40%, AO3 15%, AO4 5% — but the specification also breaks each percentage down by component, and the two components are not mirror images of each other, as the table below shows.
| Assessment objective | Component 01 (modern & literary heritage) | Component 02 (poetry & Shakespeare) | Combined |
|---|---|---|---|
| AO1 | 20% | 20% | 40% |
| AO2 | 17.5% | 22.5% | 40% |
| AO3 | 10% | 5% | 15% |
| AO4 | 2.5% | 2.5% | 5% |
| Total | 50% | 50% | 100% |
Source: OCR GCSE English Literature (J352) specification, Version 3.0, November 2025.
The gap sits in AO2 (interpretation and use of quotation) and AO3 (context), and it runs in opposite directions: Component 02 carries five percentage points more AO2 than Component 01, and Component 01 carries five percentage points more AO3 than Component 02. A student who is strong on textual analysis but weaker on situating a text in its context is, marginally, better served by Component 02's balance than Component 01's — for exactly the same overall AO1–AO4 totals the qualification publishes.
The question structure follows the same asymmetry OCR builds into every component: Section A is a two-part question — a comparison between an extract from the studied text and an unseen modern extract, plus a related question on the same studied text — and Section B is a choice between an extract-based question and a discursive question. Across the whole qualification, 25% of the total marks require a student to compare between texts. For how OCR's split compares with AQA's, Edexcel's and Eduqas's, see our board-by-board GCSE English Literature comparison.
No. OCR GCSE English Literature carries a single grade scale, 9 to 1, for every candidate — there is no Foundation or Higher tier split anywhere in the specification, unlike OCR's GCSE Maths, Science or English Language. A student's Component 01 and Component 02 papers are the same papers whatever their target grade.
On availability, OCR's own words are specific: “This qualification is available in England. For Wales and Northern Ireland please check the Qualifications in Wales Portal (QIW) or the Northern Ireland Department of Education Performance Measures/Northern Ireland Entitlement Framework Qualifications Accreditation Number (NIEFQAN) list to see current availability.” A family outside England should not assume this specification is open to their centre without checking one of those two registers directly.
Retakes are unlimited, but only as a whole qualification: a student retaking sits both components again rather than resitting a single one, and OCR runs one examination series each year, in June.
Our OCR GCSE English Literature tutors help students build exam technique around OCR’s own two-component structure, from the untiered 9-1 scale through to results day.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppTwo invented URLs on OCR's website, shaped like real qualification pages but naming subjects that do not exist, both returned a normal-looking HTTP 200 response rather than an error — and both came back as the same 48,185-byte page, byte for byte identical. A forum post, an old bookmark or a broken redirect from a revision site can all land on a page like this, and nothing in the browser's address bar or status code gives it away as wrong.
The real OCR GCSE English Literature qualification page is distinguishable, but only by what is actually on it: it returns a larger, 59,954-byte document, its title reads “English Literature (9-1) - J352”, and the code J352 appears repeatedly through the body. The 200-for-everything behaviour is specific to that one page route, not the whole ocr.org.uk domain — a request for a genuinely missing file on OCR's own document server, under /Images/, returns a normal 404 rather than a substitute page. The rule that follows is simple to apply: a resolving OCR URL under /qualifications/ proves nothing on its own; a spec code, a title matching the subject, and content specific to that subject are what confirm it.
One further, smaller thing worth knowing if you go looking at the specification-at-a-glance page yourself: its assessment table carries an extra, unlabelled fifth column in the underlying markup, reading the placeholder text “insert text”. It is a leftover from OCR's own page template, present in the page's code but rendered at well under a pixel in height (0.67px) — nobody reading the page on an ordinary screen would ever see it. It is not a claim about the qualification, only a note on the state of OCR's own website.
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Our expert OCR GCSE English Literature tutors take a student from their own school's set texts through to exam technique on both components, whatever grade they are aiming for.
Book a Free ConsultationMessage us on WhatsAppSix: Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), The War of the Worlds (H G Wells), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) and Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte). The specification prints all six in one bulleted list, then describes the choice in the very next sentence as being from “the five 19th century prose set texts”. A Christmas Carol was added in August 2018, and the counting sentence was never updated to match. All six are live options for a current student — the sentence, not the list, is what is wrong.
My Mother Said I Never Should, by Charlotte Keatley, was removed in August 2023, once its final assessment series in June 2023 had passed. Leave Taking, by Winsome Pinnock, replaced it, added to the specification in September 2022 and first assessed in June 2024. The other five modern prose or drama options — Anita and Me, Never Let Me Go, Animal Farm, An Inspector Calls and DNA — are unchanged. A family working from an older revision guide that still lists My Mother Said I Never Should is holding a text OCR has not examined since 2023.
OCR’s specification states that any printed extract in the exam “will be taken from the The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text (Collins Classics)”. Centres are not required to teach from that edition — OCR says centres “are free to use any edition of their chosen Shakespeare text but should avoid using heavily edited editions”. The four plays a school can choose from are Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing. A student revising from a heavily annotated or modernised school edition should check line numbers against the Alexander Text before the exam, since the printed extract will follow it.
Five poems in each of the anthology’s three clusters — Love and Relationships, Conflict, and Youth and Age — fifteen poems in total, replaced for first teaching in September 2022 and first examined in summer 2024. Each cluster still holds fifteen poems in total, so one third of every cluster is new since 2022. OCR names the replacement poems individually on its own teaching site, including “Flirtation” by Rita Dove and “The Perseverance” by Raymond Antrobus in Love and Relationships. A family whose older child sat the same cluster before September 2022 studied a genuinely different set of poems under the same cluster title.
No. Component 01, Exploring modern and literary heritage texts, weights AO1 at 20%, AO2 at 17.5%, AO3 at 10% and AO4 at 2.5%. Component 02, Exploring poetry and Shakespeare, weights the same four objectives at AO1 20%, AO2 22.5%, AO3 5% and AO4 2.5%. Both components total 50% of the GCSE and both sum their own four objectives to 50%, but Component 02 carries five percentage points more AO2 (interpretation and use of quotation) and five points less AO3 (context) than Component 01 does. Combined across the qualification, the totals are AO1 40%, AO2 40%, AO3 15% and AO4 5%.
No. Every candidate sits the same Component 01 and Component 02 papers and is graded on a single 9 to 1 scale — there is no Foundation or Higher tier split anywhere in OCR’s specification, unlike OCR’s GCSE Maths, Science or English Language. A student aiming for a grade 9 and a student aiming for a grade 3 answer the same questions on the same papers. Retakes are unlimited but must be taken as a whole qualification — a student resits both components together, not one on its own — and OCR runs one examination series each year, in June.
OCR’s specification states plainly: “This qualification is available in England. For Wales and Northern Ireland please check the Qualifications in Wales Portal (QIW) or the Northern Ireland Department of Education Performance Measures/Northern Ireland Entitlement Framework Qualifications Accreditation Number (NIEFQAN) list to see current availability.” A family whose centre is in Wales or Northern Ireland should not assume J352 is open to them without checking one of those two registers directly, since OCR’s own specification does not confirm availability outside England on its own.
Check the content, not the status code. Two invented OCR qualification URLs, naming subjects that do not exist, both returned a normal HTTP 200 response and the same byte-identical 48,185-byte generic page — OCR’s website does not show a distinct error for a broken link under /qualifications/. The real J352 page is larger, at 59,954 bytes, with the title “English Literature (9-1) - J352” and the code J352 repeated through the body. A link that resolves is not proof it is correct; a spec code and subject-specific content on the page it opens are.
Our specialist OCR GCSE English Literature tutors work from your child's own set texts and Component 01/02 split, alongside our wider GCSE tuition programme and, for students continuing the subject, our OCR A-level English Literature tutoring page. Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews, and 91% of our students go on to achieve their desired grades.
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