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How much context a Literature essay needs, and where it goes

Context earns 6 of the 30 marks on each Literature essay and none at all in unseen poetry or the Language papers. AQA’s examiners have spent years asking for less of it, used better: a sentence that explains a writer’s choice, inside the argument.

Long read · 8 minute read

AQA’s third assessment objective for English Literature is one line long: “Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written.” The specification gives it 15% of the qualification, 7.5% on each paper, against 37.5% for AO1 and 42.5% for AO2. Context counts. It is also the smallest of the three reading objectives by a distance, and most of the trouble with it starts when it is taught as a topic with a paragraph of its own.

Where context earns marks

In the June 2023 mark schemes for Paper 1 and Paper 2, each of the four essay questions is worth 30 marks, split 12 for AO1, 12 for AO2 and 6 for AO3 (Shakespeare and the modern text carry 4 more for AO4):

  • Paper 1, Section A: Shakespeare (Macbeth, in our range)
  • Paper 1, Section B: the 19th-century novel (A Christmas Carol)
  • Paper 2, Section A: the modern text (An Inspector Calls)
  • Paper 2, Section B: the anthology comparison (Power and Conflict)

In each essay, then, context is worth half as much as the personal response (AO1) or the analysis of methods (AO2).

The examiners read the anthology question generously. The June 2018 Paper 2 report says: “In Section B, if students are addressing the focus of the question then they are addressing AO3.”

Where it earns nothing

Unseen poetry carries no AO3. The same Paper 2 mark scheme gives the 24 marks of the first unseen question to AO1 and AO2, 12 each, and the 8-mark comparison to AO2 alone. The unseen poetry page sets out what those marks reward instead.

The Language papers have no context objective at all. The Language specification does ask students to read critically “using the context of the text”, but none of its six assessment objectives mentions context, and AO3 there means something else: “Compare writers’ ideas and perspectives, as well as how these are conveyed, across two or more texts”. Students who have learned that AO3 means context need telling that in Language it means comparison.

What the examiners keep saying

Two lines on this, the 2019 complaint about tacked-on sentences and the 2023 warning about the all-purpose Jacobean audience, are quoted in our article on What–How–Why paragraphs. Other passages in the reports make the same point with different examples, and some are funnier.

In June 2019 the Paper 1 report welcomed an improvement in AO3, “most apparent in there being far less superfluous and unhelpful information about Dickens’ father’s financial circumstances and Victorian sewers.”

The June 2023 Paper 1 report is the most specific. On A Christmas Carol: “There are frequently substantial accounts of Malthus and the Poor Laws, which would be far better summarised in a sentence, rather than developed to a paragraph or even a page in length.” On Macbeth: “Discussions of the Gunpowder plot, or of Shakespeare’s desire to gain the approval of James I, made answers longer, but did not offer more insight into how far and why Macbeth changes.” And in its section on AO3:

“Many students write about the texts without mentioning the Elizabethan era, the Jacobean era or the Victorian era and they do very well, reaching the highest levels of the mark scheme, because they are focussing on the ideas in the text, and exploring their interpretation of what the writer has to say.”

The June 2025 Paper 1 report finds the habit still there: “There continues to be a significant amount of historical detail being diligently recited, which while accurate, does not really develop the argument or explanation.” On Macbeth it draws a useful line: “For example, in Macbeth, there was a lot of information about the Great Chain of Being and the Divine Right of Kings, and whilst this can be helpful, it must be brief.”

Too vague is a problem too

The reports do not ask for context to disappear. The same 2025 report complains that “Many students are proclaiming that Dickens is a socialist, full stop”, and that in A Christmas Carol some students reduce Dickens’s message to a general wish for kindness “without acknowledging the specific social problems he was reacting to”. The examples it gives are the Poor Law and the workhouses.

So the target is specific and short. The 2023 Paper 1 report puts the balance well: students should “by all means discuss Malthus, or Dickens’ family experiences, or Darwin”, it says, “but only where these can be helpful to an answer to the actual question being asked”.

The bolted-on paragraph has moved

The 2019 report noticed a new version of the old problem: “it seems that ‘bolt on’ statements of historical context are being replaced by similarly ‘bolted on’ statements of critical theory”. Six years later the June 2025 Paper 2 report said of feminist, Marxist and Freudian readings that “In many cases, they appeared to be pre-learned ideas added regardless of task focus”. The Paper 1 report that year advised students: “Try not to repeat ideas about critical theory that you might not fully understand.”

A paragraph on Marxism in place of a paragraph on Victorian sewers is the same mistake in a smarter coat. The test is the same for both: does it help answer this question about this text?

What the examiners mean by context

The 2025 Paper 2 report describes an approach it welcomes:

“Teachers have evidently encouraged students to consider context in a much wider sense: in the context of ideas, driven by the question focus; in the context of the whole text; in the context of the genre and so on.”

It adds: “This approach to task is welcomed and well-rewarded.” The 2023 Paper 1 report praised students who connected the ideas of a text to the world now, among them answers to the question on greed in A Christmas Carol that linked Victorian poverty to the rise of foodbanks. What it valued was where the link came from: “It was clear that these were not pre-prepared statements on context, but emerging from the students’ analysis of the text in relation to the question.”

The 2025 Paper 2 report puts the whole thing in one sentence: “AO3 ultimately, of course, is just about answering the question.”

Context that explains a choice

In a What–How–Why paragraph, context goes in the Why, and only when it explains why the writer made the choice the paragraph has just analysed. Here is the model paragraph from Lesson 10 of our A Christmas Carol scheme. The question is “How does Dickens use the Ghost of Christmas Present to show that there is plenty to share?”

What
Dickens uses the Ghost of Christmas Present to show Scrooge that the world holds more than enough for everyone.
How
The spirit sits on “a kind of throne” made from a list of seventeen foods, from “turkeys” to “seething bowls of punch”, so the feast seems endless. He holds “a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn”, which links him to the cornucopia, the classical symbol of abundance.
Why
Malthus argued that population grows faster than the food supply, and Scrooge echoed him with his talk of the “surplus population”. Dickens answers that fear with an image of overflowing plenty, and the spirit’s “open hand” suggests that this plenty is meant to be shared.
Model paragraph from A Christmas Carol, Lesson 10: The Ghost of Christmas Present

Malthus gets one sentence, the length the 2023 report asks for, and it ends on Scrooge’s own words. The rest of the Why is about what Dickens does with the image of plenty. Without that sentence the Why would have nothing to answer. With a paragraph on population theory in its place, it would lose the question.

A quick check, the paste test, works on any context sentence: could it be pasted into another essay on the same text without changing a word? If it could, it is bolted on. Either tie it to the quotation and the writer’s purpose, or cut it.

The same thinking runs through our lessons. Context is taught early, in Lesson 1 of each set-text scheme, and kept fresh through Do Now questions. The teacher notes for Lesson 1 of A Christmas Carol list as a misconception “Writing context as a separate history paragraph instead of using it to explain a quotation or Dickens’s purpose.”

An Inspector Calls has two dates

Priestley set the play in 1912, before the First World War. It was first staged in Moscow in 1945 and reached London in October 1946, according to the J. B. Priestley Society. Its first audiences knew what the Birlings could not: two world wars were coming.

That gap is where much of the play’s method lives. When Mr Birling calls the Titanic “unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable”, the dramatic irony depends on the setting: everyone watching knows what he does not. When the Inspector warns of “fire and blood and anguish”, the force of the line depends on the audience’s date. Students need both dates, and they need to know which one a sentence is using. There was no audience in 1912. A sentence about what people watching in 1912 would have thought has the play’s trick the wrong way round.

The examiners reward students who use that gap. The 2018 Paper 2 report said: “Another real success was the way some students considered differences between modern and contemporary reception, perhaps most notably with An Inspector Calls.” The 2023 Paper 2 report gave another example of context working inside an argument: “For example, in An Inspector Calls, some students linked women’s suffrage and the vote to those characters whom Priestley presents as having no voice, those who find a voice and those whose voice is still ultimately controlled.”

Routines that keep context in the Why

  • Teach the context once, early and briefly, then bring it back in Do Now questions so it is there when students need it.
  • Give context one sentence at most in a paragraph, in the Why, with the writer as the subject. For example: Dickens gives Scrooge the language of Malthus so that readers hear how cold it sounds.
  • Run the paste test on every context sentence in a model answer, with the class watching.
  • Start from the focus of the question. Greed, power or guilt in the question is the context to explore, and the history comes in only to explain it.
  • For An Inspector Calls, ask which date a sentence is using: 1912 for the irony, 1945 for the purpose.
  • In feedback, when a paragraph ends with a free-standing history sentence, ask the student to rewrite it as one sentence that begins with the writer’s name.
  • In unseen poetry and in the Language papers, leave it out. A date in passing does no harm; a paragraph of biography costs time and earns nothing.

Sources

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