GCSE English Language Paper 1 2026 Predictions: What AQA’s Unseen Text Could Be

As an English teacher in the UK, each year I play a guessing game.  The game is “What will be the unseen text for GCSE English Language Paper 1?” (AQA board) and sometimes I am pretty close. Can I get it right in 2026?  

Last year, for example, I told my students I expected something like John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids to turn up, as science fiction hadn’t featured for a while in GCSE English Paper 1 (not since Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder in November 2018). Now, I didn’t get the novel right – it was The Midwich Cuckoos – but I did get the novelist.  

You're probably not too impressed with that, but you can go to the back of the class and be quiet for once.  Regardless, here are my predictions (aka guesses) for this year.

• Barry Hines – A Kestrel for a Knave (1968).  Grounded in social realism, clear and accessible prose with some great dialogue.  Plenty of tension between the protagonist and members of his family in this one.  This might be a little too realistic for AQA, however – they had a host of complaints after using The Mill by HE Bates in 2019 (and not about the part of the story featured in the extract, either!). This has perhaps been over-studied in English schools in the past, but the people who put the exam together may well have studied it and have fond memories!
  
  
• Roald Dahl – The Landlady (1959). Classic short story with a very clear structure and a strong sense of mounting tension. Starts in an ordinary, almost calm setting before gradually becoming unsettling as the protagonist’s situation shifts. Plenty of opportunities for language analysis around foreshadowing, subtle clues, and the growing sense that something is not quite right.
  
  
• Elizabeth Taylor – The Fly Paper (1959). Domestic social realism with precise, understated prose and strong focus on subtle character interaction. Set in an ordinary everyday environment, it builds tension through small social observations, awkward behaviour, and implied emotional undercurrents rather than overt action. Very effective for inference, particularly around tone, relationship dynamics, and the slow shift in mood within a realistic setting.
  
  
• Penelope Lively – The Darkness Out There (1984). Short story rooted in social realism with a strong focus on atmosphere and psychological tension. Begins in an ordinary, everyday setting before gradually revealing darker undertones and shifting the reader’s understanding of character and situation. Particularly effective for analysis of structure, especially how mood changes through subtle clues and a late-stage tonal shift.
  
  

Out of the four – I am inclined to go for something by Roald Dahl! Of course, this is just a little fun I have each year.  Plus, it could be a wish list as much as it is a series of educated guesses. However, I have been close before. 

So, how do I go about trying to predict the unseen text for Paper 1?

First of all, I look at the type of texts that have been featured over the last few years.  

I call it the 8-exam pattern.  Now AQA certainly doesn’t seem to rotate genres in a strict cycle. Instead, it rotates extract “functions” (what the passage does) more than labelled genres. That said, we can still see a pattern in what they’ve recently favoured.  

As you can see from the picture above, there has been a strong cluster of character driven prose with psychological or internal focus – and you can add a dash of moral framing in there for good measure.   Having looked through the list closely, I think the most likely type of text we’re going to get this year is contemporary social realism (contemporary to the time it was written).

I think it is likely we will have a text that shows a family (or domestic situation) or even a workplace – although my money is on a family situation. There will be subtle emotional tension in an ordinary setting – with a strong focus on character.

There is a new element in play here, of course – and that is the new wording of Question 3 (the structure question).  Now, AQA has adapted the question for all its past papers.  Their examples have included suspense, mystery, excitement, anxiety, sadness, curiosity and sympathy. 

The one that keeps coming up again and again is “How has the writer structured the text to create tension?”.  I have a feeling that they might stick with that, just to give this year’s students something that they will almost certainly have approached in class.  So we’re looking for a text that has tension – and frankly any writer will tell you that is pivotal in every and any piece of prose!  Tension can also vary wildly, too.  However, if you look at the questions that it has been used for, it is often tension between one character and external forces working upon them (often another character or their situation).  Then again, the exam board may have had a funny five minutes and decided to do a sense of desolation or a sense of happiness (wait, we might get a happy text?).

What decade will the text be from? Well, recently the 1940s and 1950s have had a very strong presence, while texts from this century have been a little thin on the ground.  The 1960s–1980s is the “gap zone” in the data, but it could easily go back earlier (the very first 9-1 paper was The Tiredness of Rosabel, written in 1908).  I am  going to take a punt on the late 50s to the late 80s with the biggest likelihood being somewhere in the middle.  As ever, this is just a feeling - AQA don’t rotate decades or genres in any reliable way; they rotate extract function + structure + language demands.

Across recent exams, there has been a mix of tension (external events), emotion (internal reaction) and observation (setting/description).  The text will most likely be controlled, accessible prose with emotional or intellectual depth - not high-action genre fiction.  So, that has also fed into my predictions and why I think the realism will be social, not supernatural...

Have I ever got it completely right? Never! Have I been close? A number of times (particularly with Paper 2, but that’s another story).  Oh, and if they go for something very early in the 20th century, my money is on D.H, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers – which has social realism, huge family tension and, being before his prose became too dense for GCSE English.

So, there you have it.  You may well be wondering why you bothered reading this, so vague are my predictions.  Plus, you know full well that reading this has given you absolutely no advantage whatsoever in the forthcoming exam at all. So, let me shut up and disappear.  Before I do, though - here's my major punt. Let's go with Roald Dahl's The Landlady and see what happens!