Petition · past parliament

Make 2021's year's English literature GCSE open book.

Rejected 11 signatures

What the petition asks

Make the 2021 English literature GCSE open book so that students can use annotated copies of the texts to help us in the GCSE exam. This includes a Shakespere play, two other texts and a poetry anthology.
With COVID-19, lots of students have found it hard to study texts that would have been studied at school. It is incredibly stressful to try to memorise many quotes and references to these texts in a short amount of time, so therefore it would make sense if next year's GCSE was open book.

In addition, with an open book exam, students will be able to focus more on learning the optimal way to write an exam than worrying about learning 100 random quotes

Why it was rejected

There was already a petition about this issue. Duplicates are rejected so signatures collect in one place.

Timeline

19 Jun 2020 Petition opened for signatures
9 Jul 2020 Rejected by the Petitions Committee

Key facts

Signatures 11
Status Rejected
Rejected 9 Jul 2020

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Source: the official petition page. Last checked 15 Jul 2026.