The national curriculum: Authors and texts selected for study: Among proposals for the national curriculum council to consider is this reading list for pupils from five to 16

FOR five to seven-year-olds, examples of books include:

Nursery rhymes and poetry chosen from anthologies.

Poems and stories in familiar settings and in imaginary worlds.

Works by significant children's authors such as Allan and Janet Ahlberg, John Burningham, Maurice Sendak, Jill Tomlinson, Beatrix Potter, Alison Utley.

Re-tellings of traditional stories, such as Rapunzel retold by Barbara Rogasky; stories from different cultures, such as A Story, A Story by Gail E Haley; stories containing predictable language, such as A Dark Dark Tale by Ruth Brown; and information books, such as The Baby's Catalogue by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.

Pupils 7 to 11:

The Eighteenth Emergency by Betsy Byars; Tom Fobble's Day (Alan Garner); The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (Penelope Lively); Tom's Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce); Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf (Catherine Storr); On the Way Home (Jill Murphy); The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (Joan Aiken); Warrior Scarlett (Rosemary Sutcliffe); The Hobbit (J R R Tolkien); Jabberwocky (Lewis Carroll); The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (Gene Kempe); The Christmas Card (Paul Theroux); The Jolly Postman (Janet and Allan Ahlberg); The Once and Future King (T H White); The Village by the Sea (Anita Desai); Tales from the Mabinogion (Kevin Crossley-Holland); How the Whale Became (Ted Hughes); The Stone Book (Alan Garner); All Hushed and Still within the House (Emily Bronte); John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat (Jenny Wagner); Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen (Russell Hoban).

Pupils 11 to 14 - fiction by some of the following, at least two before 1900 (texts cited are examples):

R L Stevenson (Treasure Island), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), L M Alcott (Little Women), Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Hardy (Wessex Tales), C Bronte (Jane Eyre), Dickens (A Christmas Carol); Orwell, Stan Barstow, John Steinbeck, H G Wells, H E Bates, William Golding, J R R Tolkien, Nina Bawden, A Garner, L Garfield, R Sutcliffe, Ursula Le Guin, Penelope Lively, Jan Mark, Rukshana Smith, Michelle Magorian, Beverly Naidoo, Anne Holm, Berlie Doherty, Joan Lingard, Katherine Paterson, P Pearce, Rosa Guy, Marjorie Darke, Gwyn Thomas.

Poems - at least five of the following, including two pre-1900: Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, W H Auden, Eliot, Betjeman, Robert Graves, R S Thomas, D H Lawrence, Vernon Scannell, Siegfried Sassoon, Dylan Thomas, G Clarke, Robert Nichols, Elizabeth Jennings, Edwin Muir, Charles Causley, John Norris, James Berry, Cope, Stevenson, Blake, Coleridge, Hardy, Browning, Tennyson, Keats, Emily Dickinson.

Pupils 14 to 16 - novels by at least three of the following, at least one pre-1900:

Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Eliot (Silas Marner), Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities), Hardy (The Mayor of Casterbridge), Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone); Graham Greene, D H Lawrence, H G Wells, H E Bates, William Golding, Orwell, L P Hartley, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, Laurie Lee, Ray Bradbury, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Mildred Taylor, John Wyndham, Doris Lessing, Susan Hill.

Works by at least five poets, including two or three writing before 1900: Blake, Coleridge, Gray, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, George Herrick, Matthew Arnold, Burns, Robert Bridges, Rossetti, George Herbert, Donne, Dickinson, Chaucer, John Clare, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, W H Auden, W B Yeats, Eliot, Louis MacNiece, Patten, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, Dannie Abse.

By 16, pupils should have read at least two Shakespeare plays and at least one play by Harold Brighouse (author of Hobson's Choice), Miller, Naughton, J B Priestley, Shaw, Sheridan, Arnold Wesker, Thornton Wilder, Oliver Goldsmith, Wilde, Robert Bolt, Peter Shaffer, Sean O'Casey, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett.