Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

Think of this as a summer heist - only instead of pinching jewellery, you’re smuggling GCSE English skills into your teenager’s brain while watching dystopian films or arguing over phone rules. Six no-fuss activities. No worksheets. Fewer eye-rolls. It’s the educational equivalent of hiding vegetables in pasta sauce - and it works.

This was a weekend painting course inspired by the gardens of Great Dixter. If you’ve never been, imagine colour at full volume. Wild tangles of poppies, calendulas, and dahlias throwing themselves into the light like they’ve got something to prove. Glorious.

So, where do all the important characters go? Romeo’s parents. When their son is busy running around with the boys, getting married at 16, killing his rival, and being banished from the city, where are Lord and Lady Montague? Busy with dinner plans?

This isn’t a reading list disguised as revision. It’s a summer-friendly mix of films, podcasts, and context boosters designed to help students feel confident come September and give parents a way into the texts that will dominate the conversation by mock season.

If you (or your teenager) are studying Edexcel A Level after the summer, you might be tackling the full Romantics selection - or just Keats. For AQA, OCR, or IB, one or more of these revolutionary poets are likely to appear. These long holidays offer the perfect opportunity to deepen understanding without cracking open another anthology... just yet.

You can always spot a Romantic. They’re the heart-first thinkers who refused to believe that God or logic alone could explain the world. The ones who turned away from convention and wrote about imagination like it mattered more than politics. Which, for many of them, it did.

Welcome to the strange twilight zone that is mid-May - the middle of exam season. You may be starting to feel like you live with a ghost who only emerges for snacks, sighs a lot, and occasionally mutters something about "how many exams are left?". Days are counted in exam papers. Life is looking endlessly bleak. Hurrah, it’s the mid-point moan: the bit where adrenaline has worn off, motivation is flagging, and no one’s quite sure what day it is (without looking at an exa

There’s a reason An Inspector Calls remains firmly entranced in the GCSE syllabus: it’s deceptively simple. A family gathered in an...

While much of Hong Kong enjoys the serenity of Buddha’s Birthday, lotus lanterns, temple visits, maybe even a rare moment of peace, parents of exam-taking students are more likely lighting incense in the vague hope it will cleanse the air of teenage angst and essay-induced doom.

There’s a particular magic that happens when you sit down in a theatre real, velveteen-seated, actual air-in-the-room theatre - and the lights go down.

I was working with one of my lovely A Level students the other day, and we were deep into our discussion of Hamlet - when it happened. I got it. I got Hamlet.

There are some decisions in life that require deep contemplation. Applying for a job. Choosing a partner. Picking your Desert Island Discs. And then, there’s naming a puppy.

Easter is nearly upon us, hurrah, up to three weeks for your child to revise for their exams. Are you ready? Are they?

Rejection: the gut-punch every writer faces. History is full of books dismissed before becoming literary classics.

For those of us in the business of literature, St Patrick's day is a chance to celebrate Ireland’s unrivalled literary legacy.

Reading a book or watching a film and a dog appears, steel yourself. It is most likely about to be devastating shorthand for human despair.

And that’s the power of reading, isn’t it? Stories settle differently in the mind when they pass through the eyes rather than the ears.

Yes, World Book Day is upon us once again: that annual festival of hurriedly Amazon-Primed costumes and polyester-fuelled meltdowns.

Fear not. Be it GCSE, IB, or A Level English Language and/or Literature, here are a few survival strategies... chocolate is involved.

In a world where the news reads like a rejected Black Mirror script, it’s no wonder dystopian fiction is having a moment.