Year 13 OCR A-Level English Literature (H472) in 2027

OCR A-Level English Literature (H472) is a three-component qualification whose Year 13 candidates sit two closed-text written papers in the June 2027 series: H472/01 on Thursday 13 May 2027 and H472/02 on Thursday 20 May 2027, each lasting 2 hours 30 minutes. June 2027 is also the first series examined on OCR's replacement Shakespeare list, and three of that list's six plays have never appeared on an H472/01 paper.

Three of the Six Shakespeare Plays on H472/01 in June 2027 Have Never Been Examined

Section 1 of H472/01 sets one Shakespeare play, chosen from a list of six. In the specification OCR publishes, dated July 2026, that list reads: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest.

Half of it is new. OCR's own summary of updates, printed at the back of the same document, records the change against an October 2024 revision: “Replaced three of the Shakespeare set texts for first teaching from 2025 and assessment from 2027: removal of Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night, and addition of King Lear, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew”. A second line, against the July 2026 revision, records that OCR then “Removed set texts for examination until 2026” from the same section — the outgoing plays are no longer printed in the specification at all.

A Year 13 in 2026/27 began the course in September 2025 and sits the paper in June 2027, which puts them squarely inside both halves of that sentence: first taught on the new list, and the first cohort assessed on it.

The consequence is uneven, and it depends entirely on which play a school picked. Reading the three most recent question papers OCR publishes for H472/01 — June 2025, June 2024 and June 2023 — the Shakespeare questions are set on Hamlet, Richard III, The Tempest, Coriolanus, Measure for Measure and Twelfth Night. King Lear, Othello and The Taming of the Shrew do not appear in any of them, and the June 2025 examiners' report for the paper does not discuss them either.

It is worth being exact about what that does and does not establish. OCR does not publish the June 2026 papers, so this rests on two things: OCR's own wording that the three additions are assessed from 2027, and the three published papers that were actually read. Together they are enough to say that no paper a Year 13 can obtain sets King Lear, Othello or The Taming of the Shrew, and not enough to say more than that.

What has not changed is the machinery around the question. The paper is still 60 marks over 2 hours 30 minutes, Section 1 still asks two linked parts on the same play, and the assessment objectives and mark scheme are those already published. Where OCR prints an extract on the paper it is taken from The Alexander Text, as it was before. A student on King Lear can therefore learn the question format from a Hamlet paper; what they cannot do is see how an examiner has previously handled their own text.

Which of Component 01's Two Sections Is in Its First Examined Year, and Which Is in Its Last?

They point in opposite directions, on the same paper, in the same two and a half hours. Section 1 is in its first examined year in June 2027. Section 2 is near the end of its run.

Section 2 asks for one pre-1900 drama text and one pre-1900 poetry text, and the specification introduces its list with a date: “The set texts for examination until 2028 are”. The drama choices are Marlowe's Edward II, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Ibsen's A Doll's House and Wilde's An Ideal Husband. The poetry choices are Chaucer's The Merchant's Prologue and Tale, Milton's Paradise Lost Books 9 and 10, Coleridge's Selected Poems, Tennyson's Maud and Rossetti's Selected Poems.

Immediately beneath, the same page prints the list that replaces it: “The set texts for first teaching from 2027 and examination from 2029 are”, bringing in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Behn's The Rover, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Chaucer's The Franklin's Prologue and Tale, Milton's Paradise Lost Books 1 and 2, Barrett Browning's Selected Poems and Clare's Selected Poems, with The Duchess of Malfi, A Doll's House and Rossetti's Selected Poems carried across.

For a Year 13 sitting in June 2027 that arithmetic is simple and useful: the Section 2 texts have two series left, June 2027 and June 2028, and several years of past questions behind them. The Section 1 play may have none. It is the same paper, and the two halves of it are supported by completely different amounts of material.

The distinction is easy to blur, because two separate set-text changes are running at once and they land in different places. The October 2024 change altered the Shakespeare list in Section 1 and takes effect in 2027. The change dated April 2026 refreshes the Section 2 drama and poetry lists and does not take effect until 2029. A Year 13 in 2027 is affected by the first and not at all by the second. The Year 12 OCR English Literature page covers what the later change means for the cohort behind them.

OCR Has Published June 2026's Grade Boundaries but Not June 2026's Question Papers

The two halves of a completed exam series are not released together, and for a Year 13 revising in 2026/27 the gap between them is the practical shape of the problem.

OCR's past paper finder, filtered to AS and A Level English Literature at A Level, listed six series when checked on 26 September 2026: June 2025, June 2024, June 2023, June 2022, November 2021 and November 2020. The most recent question paper on it is June 2025, sat on Wednesday 14 May 2025. There is no June 2026 entry. OCR's past paper policy explains the window rather than the gap, stating that “Past papers are available on our website for five years”.

The boundaries from that same June 2026 series are published. OCR's grade boundaries page carries an AS and A Level document under its June 2026 heading. So the outcome of the most recent sitting is on the site while the paper that produced it is not, and a Year 13 revising in the 2026/27 academic year is working from a paper archive that stops eighteen months before their own exam.

One thing follows from that which is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to get wrong. Third-party sites that mirror OCR's papers do not always label them correctly. Revision World, which ranks prominently for this qualification's past papers, files OCR's June 2024 H472/01 paper under a heading reading June 2025, and its June 2023 paper under June 2024; the documents themselves carry footers reading H472/01 Jun24 and H472/01 Jun23, and OCR's own finder files them under those years. Every OCR question paper prints its series in the footer of each page. That footer is what the document is; the page that links to it is not evidence of what year it came from.

The Two Written Papers Are Seven Days Apart in 2027, Twelve Days Closer Than in 2026

OCR's final examination timetable for June 2027 puts both H472 written papers on a Thursday morning: H472/01 Drama and poetry pre-1900 on 13 May 2027, and H472/02 Comparative and contextual study on 20 May 2027. Each runs 2 hours 30 minutes.

In the June 2026 series the same two papers sat on Wednesday 13 May 2026 and Monday 1 June 2026 — nineteen days apart. Seven days against nineteen is twelve days less room, and it falls in the part of the calendar where a student is revising two entirely different papers: a closed-text Shakespeare and pre-1900 paper, then a comparative paper with an unseen passage.

The coursework deadline lands between them. OCR's key dates file for 2026/27 sets the non-exam assessment mark submission deadline for the June 2027 series at Saturday 15 May 2027, which is two days after the first written paper and five days before the second. A school's marking and internal standardising for Component 03 is therefore still formally open while its candidates are sitting H472/01.

None of those dates moves for an individual student. The contingency day on 23 June 2027 is not a reserve sitting a candidate can ask for; OCR lists it for national or significant local disruption, and every candidate is expected to remain available until the examination period closes on 18 June 2027.

Why Does OCR Need the Coursework Approved Three Weeks Before the Entry?

Component 03, Literature post-1900, is worth 40 marks and 20% of the A-level, and it is the one part of H472 whose content OCR vets in advance. The date it does that is Sunday 31 January 2027, and it is the only deadline of its kind in OCR’s key dates file for the 2026/27 year.

Reading every row of OCR's key dates file for 2026/27, exactly one carries a proposals deadline. It reads: “Text and task proposals deadline for A Level English Language (H470/03), English Literature (H472/03), English Language and Literature (EMC) (H474/04) and History A (H505) unit Y100”. The specification states the same rule in its own words, giving the deadline for submitting texts and task choices as 31st January of the year of assessment, submitted through what OCR calls the Literature post-1900 text and task tool.

What makes the date worth a Year 13 family's attention is where it sits relative to everything else. The entries deadline for the June 2027 series is Sunday 21 February 2027, which is 21 days later. OCR therefore requires a school to say what a student's coursework is about three full weeks before it requires the school to enter that student for the qualification at all. For a student joining a school in the spring term, or changing option in January, that ordering is the constraint that actually bites.

Two further rules decide how much of this is the student's call. OCR's guidance for the component says the texts and task titles should be chosen by the learner in discussion with their teacher, but that all texts and task titles must be approved for use by OCR; the approval tool carries a database of pre-approved texts and tasks, and a school choosing from it is on quicker ground than one proposing something new. OCR's own guidance also answers the question directly, confirming that teachers may select the coursework texts for candidates rather than leaving a free choice. So the honest answer to “who picked these three books” is that it varies by school, and a Year 13 who does not know should ask.

The submission route is not the student's call at all, and it is decided for everyone at once. OCR runs two moderation routes for the component, and its guidance is explicit that all learners' work must be submitted using the same entry option and that it is not possible for a centre to offer both options within the same series. Where a centre has fewer than 15 learners, all the work goes to the moderator rather than a sample of it. The suggested length for the folder is 3,000 words, excluding quotations, task titles, footnotes and bibliography.

How Leading Tuition Works With Year 13 OCR H472 Students

The first session on a Year 13 OCR programme is spent establishing the three things that decide everything after it: which Shakespeare play the school teaches for Section 1, which of the five Component 02 topics it entered, and which three post-1900 texts went to OCR for approval. Those are school decisions, they are already made by Year 13, and a tutor who assumes them gets the whole year wrong.

Where the play is King Lear, Othello or The Taming of the Shrew, the work is different in kind from ordinary past-paper practice, because there are no past questions on the text. What transfers is the paper's shape rather than its content: the two-part structure of Section 1, the balance of assessment objectives OCR publishes for the component, and the way examiners have rewarded close work on language and dramatic effect in the reports that do exist. We build question banks on the student's own play against that structure rather than drilling a paper that was written for a different text.

For Component 03 the timetable does most of the arguing. With texts and tasks fixed with OCR by 31 January 2027 and marks due on 15 May 2027, the drafting window is the spring term, and it overlaps the point at which revision for two closed-text papers should be starting. Our expert A-level English Literature tutors help Year 13 students hold both at once — finishing a 3,000-word folder to the mark scheme it will actually be marked against, while building closed-text recall for 13 and 20 May.

Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 59 reviews, read on 3 October 2026, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. You can book a free consultation to talk through a Year 13 programme. Students on other OCR A-levels in the same year can read our Year 13 OCR A-Level Chemistry page, and the board-level detail for this subject sits on the A-level English Literature page.

Frequently Asked Questions About Year 13 OCR A-Level English Literature

Checked 26 September 2026 against OCR's own documents: the A Level English Literature specification (H472) dated July 2026, its past paper finder and past paper policy, the key dates and timetables files for 2026/27 and June 2027, the grade boundaries page, the specification at a glance, and the June 2025, June 2024 and June 2023 question papers. Specification revisions are cited by date rather than version number, because OCR's own numbering is not sequential.