‘Bold, brilliant, thrilling’: leading authors on the novels every school should teach — SkimNews
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- Kate Mosse, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, David Mitchell, Ben Okri and Kamila Shamsie, among others, recommended specific titles for GCSE English, including Percival Everett's The Trees, Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others, Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These and Debbie Tucker Green's play Random.
- The End Sexism in Schools "Manopolies" report (2025) found 76% of students study An Inspector Calls for their modern text from a possible 21 modern texts, and 93% study either A Christmas Carol or Jekyll and Hyde from just nine possible 19th-century novels.
- Only 5% of GCSE English students in England and Wales study a female-authored text, according to the same report, despite works by Kit de Waal, Tanika Gupta, Jeanette Winterson and Malorie Blackman being available on exam-board lists.
- An Inspector Calls has been on one exam board's set-text list for 39 years, the article notes, with schools disincentivised to switch texts because of costs and exam boards reluctant to remove popular titles for commercial reasons.
- The National Literacy Trust designated 2026 the National Year of Reading after the share of eight-to-18-year-olds who enjoy reading in their free time rose from a 20-year low of 32.7% in 2025 to 36.1%.
- The UK's creative industries contribute £145.8bn annually to the economy, the article states, framing reading as the country's "soft superpower."
Why it matters: The article makes a concrete policy ask of the government — that the Department for Education mandate regular set-text changes and require gender and cultural diversity, because schools cannot fix this alone. With 93% of students funnelled into the same two 19th-century novels and exam boards commercially locked into long-running titles like An Inspector Calls, the curriculum monopoly will persist without top-down intervention.
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