The 2000 AQA anthology covered four sections: poets in the English Literary Heritage, poems from other cultures and traditions, 20th-century prose, and 20th- or pre-20th-century poetry.
GCSE English students studied all of the poems in either cluster and answered a question on them in Section A of Paper 2.
In 2005, Andrew Cunningham, an English teacher at Charterhouse School complained in the Telegraph that the inclusion of the poems represented an "obsession with multi-culturalism".
[5] In 2008 the Anthology was reissued without "Education for Leisure" following complaints about its reference to knives and concerns about rising levels of knife crime in schools.
[13] The newest edition of the anthology was produced for first teaching in 2015,[14][15] in line with the reformed GCSE English Literature qualification.