Why Context is the Superpower to Upgrade from Grade 7 in English Literature GCSE

The question I am most frequently asked by students requiring tutoring in GCSE English Literature is “What do I need to do to upgrade from grade 7 to grade 9?”

The first thing I say is that achieving this is not as easy as it might seem, on account of the relative steepness of the English Literature grade boundary line at the top end. For example, to go from grade 7 to grade 9 in AQA, you need to improve by 19% in English Literature but only by 12% in GCSE English Language.

The next thing I show is the distribution of marks across the AQA assessment objectives AO1, AO2, AO3 & AO4. Here, students are surprised by the relative importance of AO3, which accounts for 15% of the total marks available across AQA Papers 1 and 2.

Why Is the Importance of AO3 Underestimated?

Students are generally taught to focus on refining their answers to address the “big” assessment objectives AO1 and AO2. AO3 is often treated as an afterthought, to be woven into an answer where appropriate, using one or two stock facts. For example, I’ve lost count of the number of essays I’ve read which state “Shakespeare portrayed the witches as evil in Macbeth largely to appeal to King James I, who was deeply interested in the occult and wrote a book called Daemonologie.” Although this may be true, it is rarely relevant to the question asked and is unlikely to advance an argument about why the play was written in that particular time and place, and what effect it might have had on the audience. But addressing precisely these aspects will maximise vital AO3 marks and potentially make the difference between a grade 7 and a grade 8 or 9.

What Is Required to Optimise AO3 (Context) Marks?

Effectively, there are two distinct things the examiner will look for when scoring Context:

1.      How the text itself relates to its historical, social, and political context.

2.      How the writer’s intentions and themes are illuminated by their context.

These are not the same thing, because #1 is about the text and #2 is about the writer. Unless the writer’s subject is set in exactly the same place at exactly the same time as they are writing, there will be a different context (historical, social, political) for each. So the first thing to do is to get a clear idea of when and where the text is set, as well as when and where the writer is writing it. (In practice, it is often easier to start by understanding the writer’s context, but don’t forget that the text’s context will often be different.)

How Does AO3 Work in Practice?

Here is a useful checklist of five aspects of context worth investigating for any English Literature set text:

Let’s use it to build up AO3 for one of the most commonly taught GCSE modern drama texts, An Inspector Calls.

1.      J.B. Priestley was a British writer and social commentator whose experiences during and after the First World War shaped his views on society. As a committed democratic socialist, Priestley believed that society should be more equitable, with responsibility shared across social classes.

2.      An Inspector Calls was written in the UK in 1945, in the final months of the Second World War and immediately before the General Election of July 1945. The election’s campaigning was focused on leadership of the country and its post-war future. The play can therefore be interpreted as a considered intervention in the campaign to convince the country not to return to the pre-war conservative consensus and instead to move forward into a socialist future.

3.      However, the play is set in 1912, just before the First World War. This deliberate historical distance allowed Priestley to reflect critically on earlier societal attitudes, especially those concerning class, responsibility, and power. His aim was to encourage audiences to learn from past mistakes and work towards a more just, compassionate society.

4.      Interpretations of the play have evolved from a straightforward post-war socialist warning into a multi-layered psychological, metaphysical, and theatrical critique. For example, modern criticism often treats Inspector Goole as a supernatural entity, the collective conscience of the family, or even the embodiment of the audience's hindsight, moving away from whether he is a "real" police officer to what his psychological disruption achieves.

5.      The play’s 1945 composition was contemporaneous with the David Lean film Brief Encounter and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The first treats an affair as something of a romantic counterpoint to the brutal sexism of An Inspector Calls. The second paints the abyss not of conservatism but of totalitarian socialism. But the most obvious influence is J.W. Dunne’s Experiment With Time (1927). Dunne’s theories of serial time may have inspired the cyclical ending - where a real inspector is seemingly on his way - interpreted as a purgatorial time-loop.

How to Work AO3 Into an Exam Answer

Of course, not all of these AO3 contextual talking points will be relevant for every question; indeed, if they were, you might end up spending all your time writing about AO3, forgetting about AO1 and AO2 (which, after all, comprise four-fifths of the marks). The trick is to weave your understanding of how the different aspects of context operate within the terms of reference of the question. For example, in answering the question “How does Priestley explore the importance of social class in the play?”, you may choose to refer to his choice of 1912 to accentuate the extremities of class conflict that were no longer so apparent in 1945. Or, if confronted with “How does Priestley present life for women in An Inspector Calls?” you may refer to modern feminist readings of Eva Smith/Daisy Renton, framing her not just as a symbol of economic exploitation, but as a victim of systemic patriarchal and sexual oppression by upper-class men.

Why Mastering Context/AO3 Is an Easy Superpower to Acquire

This is because it will take you longer to read this blog than to research each of the five context aspects for any of your set texts. Once you’ve got these at your fingertips, it’s simply a matter of working out which are the most relevant to support your answer to the question in the exam. This will be the easiest 15% of the total marks you’ve ever earned (and perhaps make all the difference between grade 7 and grade 8 or 9!).