The History Boys: Gifted and Talented Pack for GCSE

Challenging activity pack that stretches your gifted and more able students during their exploration of The History Boys at GCSE. The activities demonstrate how to achieve the highest grades possible using aspects of Bloom’s Taxonomy and give students control over their own learning.

This resource is stunning, frankly one of the best I have seen available for GCSE

K Chanter, HoD & Peer Reviewer

The resource covers the key areas of the text: important events, characters, context, language, structure, form, themes, ideas and interpretations. Within each key area, engaging and thought-provoking activities aim to:

  1. Prompt the recall of important points, aid comprehension and reinforce clear, advanced understanding
  2. Support literal and abstract analyses
  3. Enable students to apply their knowledge of the play to a new situation or an unseen extract, encourage individual interpretations and stimulate new, creative and individual ideas

Teacher’s notes and answers have been included for the more challenging tasks.

What do teachers say about this resource? (5696)

This resource is stunning, frankly one of the best I have seen available for GCSE. It stretches the highest level student responses and provides that opportunity to be creative which is so often lacking in the higher ability teacher guides... It provides a one-stop resource booklet for students to work from and would save teacher labour hugely... I think this matches the new AQA draft specification for 2015+ beautifully. Having spent time looking at the draft for literature and having decided on this as a top set text, I feel this resource would be so perfect for that element and was really pleased to see something of such outstanding quality... What a top resource! I would not hesitate to buy this to inform both my understanding of the text and my teaching of it.

K Chanter, HoD & Peer Reviewer

An excellent resource with a vast amount of content. Plenty of creative teaching ideas and activities that will bring this play to life. This resource clearly supports the OCR exam spec by developing and enabling imaginative and critical responses (AO1). There is also a clear focus on language, structure and form contribute and how these contribute to writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings (AO2)... The resource is suitably challenging for A/A* candidates – I like the inclusion of Virginia Woolf’s essay.

P Doorbar, English Teacher & Peer Reviewer

Very thorough, and challenging. A good range of activity ideas. It's a resource to be used after reading the entire play, as there are spoilers from the beginning! It provides excellent insight into the wider issues that top-ability candidates should be aware of, and include in their own responses. It provides opportunities for teachers to challenge the more able during lessons.

J Murphy, Teacher & Peer Reviewer

The student choice option is really good – allowing students to take a greater responsibility for their own progress (especially with A/A* students) is very important... A further positive was the inclusion of other critical readings and the encouragement students received to justify their responses – this challenges their thinking and so more-able students would be better able to demonstrate their ability to evaluate and critique, therefore making it easier to hit the top band grade criteria.

K Jagger, Teacher & Peer Reviewer