The authors every teenager should read

Ken Boston is today launching the biggest shake-up of the secondary school curriculum for years. The chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is announcing a new slimmed-down national curriculum for 11- to 16-year-olds that puts more emphasis on teaching topics than traditional timetabled subjects.

This will enable students to research subjects in much greater depth and make learning more relevant to the big issues of the day, Boston thinks. He argues, for example, that because global warming straddles two subjects, science and geography, it should be taught as a topic in its own right. Pupils will be able to use what they learn about global warming in each of the subject areas later. Another topic will be economic capability: ensuring that young people are financially literate, with lessons on how to open a bank account or buy a home.

So far, Boston, 64, has not found it easy to convince everyone of the merits of this approach. One national newspaper has labelled him a "trendy progressive", out to destroy traditional teaching practices. And some teachers at the Prince of Wales' Teaching Institute's summer school have expressed concern that the proposals would reduce the space for subjects such as history.

Boston, however, is adamant that teaching through topics makes sense in today's world. "There is nothing 'New Age' about these proposals," he says. "Books will still have to be read, and history will still have to be studied to give people a sense of their own culture and other people's." Mick Waters, the QCA's director of curriculum, puts it more succinctly: "Litmus paper will still turn red when it comes into contact with acid. Anne Boleyn's head will still be chopped off in history."

There will also still be a list of authors that pupils should study in English at the key stage four (age 14 to 16). "For should, read must," says Boston, showing that he believes it is vital for young people to study the literary canon.

This year, he is adding to the national curriculum a list of authors from non-English cultures and traditions whom the QCA believes children should be able to study. These include Chinua Achebe, Maya Angelou, Benjamin Zephaniah and Meera Syal, the comedy actress perhaps better known for her appearances in the BBC TV series, Goodness Gracious Me.

The great classical writers and poets are still there, from Jane Austen to John Keats. But Boston says that teachers will have the freedom to choose when to introduce individual pupils to them. "You could begin with something not too taxing for some pupils, like Orwell, and then move on to more difficult works such as Thomas Hardy," he says.

The idea is that this approach will help teachers develop a personalised learning programme for each pupil, one of the key objectives of the Government. Shakespeare keeps his compulsory place in the curriculum, although the number of plays to be studied for the 14-year-olds' national test in Shakespeare has been whittled down to a choice of two rather than three, something that has so far failed to attract much controversy.

To reflect the growing influence of China and the importance of the Middle East, the modern languages offering has been changed. No longer will young people between the ages of 11 and 14 be confined to studying only European languages. This reform should pave the way for an increased take-up of languages such as Mandarin and Arabic.

In history, there will be an increased emphasis on British history, and history students will have to take a topic described as "the development of political power from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, including changes in the relationship between rulers and ruled over time: the changing relationship between Crown and Parliament and the development of democracy". The topic is included to counter the criticism that too much British history starts and ends with the Tudors.

Boston has come a long way in his five years at the helm of the QCA. He arrived from Australia in 2002 on the very day that the A-level marking scandal broke and was immediately wheeled into a press conference where, diplomatically, he remained largely silent. The scandal resulted in up to 2,000 students having their marks reviewed as a result of confusion over grading boundaries for the new A-level syllabus.

"I talked then about examinations being a cottage industry, with people working on kitchen tables for piece rates," he says now. "Since then there has been a very, very substantial improvement. There's been a real achievement with the logistics of delivery of papers. You can no longer have papers left on post-office counters or doorsteps. We now have bar-coded delivery by courier – and they are not delivered unless the recipient can be identified."

Markers' pay has been increased, with the result that this year, for the first time, there is no shortage of markers. They can be fired, and their work can be checked more quickly online, with scripts they have marked sent to a senior examiner and double checked within minutes. "If any of them are out of line, they can be brought to book," Boston says.

"In short, it is no longer a 19th-century cottage industry. It is now in the very late 20th century, and will be brought into the 21st century." He holds up a mobile phone. "There's no reason why students can't get their exam results on these in future." Indeed, the Edexcel exam board is conducting a pilot on texting results this year.

The changes will not stop with today's announcement. Boston has agreed to a two-year extension of his contract, keeping him in the UK until at least the end of 2009.

Next year will see changes to A-levels, including the new A* grade, awarded to pupils who start their courses next September and score 90 per cent on their exams in the summer of 2010. The number of modules going to make up the A-level will be reduced from six to four.

Exam boards have also been told to make their questions much more open-ended, to encourage pupils to use their creative thinking skills. Lastly, the Government will introduce 14 new diplomas, no longer denoted specialist or vocational. Boston says they will mix academic and vocational content. The first five, including construction and the built environment, tourism, and engineering and leisure, will be piloted in schools next year.

Boston, and the Government that has given the green light to his blueprint, will likely be attacked by those who argue that his changes mark a return to child-centred learning. Boston goes on the attack. "Why shouldn't learning be child-centred?", he asks.

"The old days when the teacher came into the room, delivered the syllabus as scripted to a row of seats and left at the end of the lesson without knowing whether learning had taken place are gone. In the future, you may still have a day where children are learning the pluperfect at 10 o'clock, doing quadratic equations at 11, going to lunch at 12, coming back to science at 1.30 and studying the cause of the American civil war at 2.30 – but that won't happen all the time.

According to Boston, that kind of fragmentation of the timetable will not always be beneficial. If you introduce more topic-based work, children will still be learning, he says. The debate has just begun, but Boston, a sports-loving Australian, may well have made one move that will warm the heart of many traditionalists. He has chosen a thorougly traditional setting for unveiling the new secondary school curriculum - Lord's Cricket Ground in north-west London.

From Meera Syal to Charles Dickens: Ken Boston's list for 14- to 16-year-olds

Contemporary writers

Douglas Adams, Richard Adams, Fleur Adcock, Isabel Allende, Simon Armitage, Alan Ayckbourn, JG Ballard, Pat Barker, Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale, Bill Bryson, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, Brian Clark, Gillian Clarke, Robert Cormier, Jennifer Donnelly, Keith Douglas, Roddy Doyle, Carol Ann Duffy, UA Fanthorpe, John Fowles, Brian Friel, Mark Haddon, Willis Hall, David Hare, Tony Harrison, Susan Hill, SE Hinton, Jackie Kay, Harper Lee, Laurie Lee, Andrea Levy, Joan Lingard, Penelope Lively, Liz Lochhead, Mal Peet, Philip Pullman, Peter Porter, Willy Russell, Jo Shapcott, RC Sherriff, Zadie Smith, Arnold Wesker

English literary heritage

Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, John Bunyan, Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Congreve, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, John Donne, John Dryden, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hardy, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, John Keats, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, RB Sheridan, Edmund Spenser, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Vaughan, HG Wells, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Wyatt

Twentieth century heritage list

Kingsley Amis, WH Auden, TS Eliot, EM Forster, Robert Frost, William Golding, Graham Greene, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Jennings, James Joyce, Philip Larkin, DH Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Sean O'Casey, George Orwell, Wilfred Owen, Harold Pinter, Slyvia Plath, JB Priestley, Siegfried Sassoon, Peter Shaffer, George Bernard Shawe, Stevie Smith, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas, RS Thomas, William Trevor, Evelyn Waugh, John Wyndham, WB Yeats

Writers from different cultures and traditions

Chinua Achebe, John Agard, Monica Ali, Maya Angelou, Moniza Alvi, Isaac Bashevis-Singer, James Berry, Edward Brathwaite, Anita Desai, Emily Dickinson, F Scott Fitzgerald, Athol Fugard, Jamila Gavin, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Doris Lessing, Les Murray, Beverly Naidoo, RK Narayan, Grace Nichols, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Wole Soyinka, John Steinbeck, Meera Syal, Bali Rai, Mildred D Taylor, Mark Twain, Derek Walcott, Walt Whitman, Tennessee Williams, Adeline Yen Mah, Benjamin Zephaniah

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