Why Your Year 7 Scheme Needs an Anti-Hero

📌We need true heroes because they show us bravery and responsibility, but we also need a character who gets it wrong, who we root for despite their very real flaws. It’s easy to see why heroes do what they do. They just do stuff because they’re good. Of course spider man will save the victims. It would be horrendous if he didn’t. But anti-heroes are different. They act despite their flaws or misgivings; their ability to make a decision that is uncomfortable and act anyway is remarkable. They model for us the process of becoming moral, becoming the hero. The show us what normal people like us would think or decide, and we root for them. Maybe, for the first time a new idea awakens, the idea that other people root for us too. A thought that doesn’t often occur to the very young; that strangers, not just parents have hearts big enough that they would prefer to see you win and that that is normal.

All the fears of teen years and the yelling of social media, and yes, even being told off by teachers makes it seem like everyone is just out to protect their own corner of the world. I think this is fairly true, but it’s not all that’s true. Social media, especially when combined with hostile school environments or stressful family life, throttles the cheers of strangers. It makes pupils deaf to them. I makes the world seem cold. Maybe it’s an age thing as I now approach middle age, but my desire to see other people happy, people I don’t even know, is so strong. I don’t want to be taken advantage of. I don’t really want to work very hard. I don’t want to have money taken from me or anything. But if I had to choose between you succeeding and you not succeeding, I choose for you to succeed. And what’s more, I want that so much, I will devote my time and money to that end. And I think anti-heroes let us explore that idea; it’s normal to empathise with someone and want the best for them. That desire to just simply prefer people do well rather than not, is normal.

Too often the message young people end up picking up about the world is that everything is a competition, and that therefore means that other people must lose, and we should all be happy about other people losing because it means we have a better chance of winning. I do think that life is really competitive, I just don’t think it’s logical to presume that other people have to lose for me to win. Life is not winner takes all. Society has gotten into this very weird little space where we almost rejoice in the suffering of others. If I had to postulate about why I’d say it’s because these same ideas have shredded individuals’ self-efficacy, but that’s for another blog. In summary. Anti heroes teach you to hope for others even when there is nothing in it for you, and that’s a pretty bloody wholesome thing to teach.

🟪What’s the Point of Year 7, Really?

Year 7 is when pupils are taking their first steps into their new identity as individuals without their parents. It’s the perfect time to think deeply about empathy and hope. Year 7 is also commonly thought of as the year when pupils learn vocabulary and writing structures that are foundational to their later GCSE success, and for good reason. It can take a long time to build all those GCSE level skills from scratch. Pupils need to understand at least the basics by the end of KS3. I’m on board with this idea in a big, general way, but I also think something else. It’s when we have to get them to be able to start to toy with ideas in their mind. For the first time ever, we get to help them think about the way they think. It’s when we get them to start articulating feelings, which up until then all seem a little too ambiguous and easily conflated. It’s hard work. It takes a lot of intentional effort to get monosyllabic answers to turn into reasoned arguments, but if we can do it, we can improve pupils quality of thought, which improves more than just their English grades.

Yes, we want to build pupil’s analytical writing, but teaching them how to do PEA or DAFOREST for months in year 7 is not how you get there. Nor do you get there by teaching unnecessarily obtuse texts to pupils who can’t read them: if you’re a primary teacher teaching the Iliad, give your head a wobble. You get there by triggering a love of verbalising specific thought. Which can be done because virtually everybody in the world loves their own opinion. Do not underestimate this lure. It’s so powerful. People love their own opinions, and year 7 are no different. They just aren’t too sure about whether the amount of effort required is worth is and whether they will find effort satisfying or not.

The primary goal of year 7 is to raise/ create/ empower students who read actively, not passively, out of sheer interest. They read because they want to know. We want pupils who engage with the texts so well, that they can’t help but want to ask questions, and postulate why characters have made certain choices. They for the first time perhaps gain an understanding that people’s actions are often simply reactions to the situations they find themselves in, and therefore there are nearly always reasons for them. It is when pupils, perhaps for the first time, start to explore causality with a real degree of complexity. They get the chance to discover that some people are more reactive and are constantly responding to life, and some people are proactive and decide they want things and pursue them. That is a big realisation. (also quite a big generalisation on my part, but you get my point)

At this age, students are already watching relatively grown up media. They understand characters who are selfish, mistaken, inconsistent — human. But they don’t always do a great job of understanding or naming character motivations. Often this is because their emotional vocabulary is so limited. If you can only say somebody is mad, sad or bad, you aren’t going to be able to explain or analyse a story. We have to get them over the hurdle of this simplistic emotional vocabulary and we have to do it fast. For the sake of their English GCSE, but also for their own life. It’s so much easier to deal with pupils who can explain to you what the problem is. When they can’t recognise or verbalise it, it can take up a heck of a lot of class time.

🟪Year 7 curricula are often strongly skewed in teaching dodgy paragraph structures.

Too often, we go from:

✓ “In what ways is this character kind?”

to

✗ “Find evidence that they’re a good person.”

That’s not analysis — it’s reductive. It’s also not remotely a hard skill. Take this with a pinch of salt, but in my opinion you barely need to teach quotation selection. It’s odd that we spend so much time on it in schools. It’s like teaching true or false questions. It’s a fools errand. It’s something that you can just explain to a child later on in in their school career in about 5 minutes and they get it just fine. You don’t get that much better just practicing that skill, you need to be able to read and interpret better, and then you end up better at quotation selection as a result. There’s absolutely no shame in just choosing the quotations or sections of the text you want your year 7's to work with. It saves a heck of a lot of time. Imagine if you didn’t spend any time with a year 7 class rooting round for quotations. You had them pre-selected. Would they know what a quotation is by year 8 - yes. Would they know what you do with quotations by the time you got to year 8- yes. Could you in fact teach them far more advanced skills if you pre-selected quotations? - yes. You could get them to pair, group, or ‘synthesise’ quotations much better which would give them a stronger appreciation of structure and writer’s methods.

🟪Rethinking year 7

Let’s have a little reframe. Instead of thinking year 7 is about getting them to find quotations or write PEAs, let’s get to a point where we make it about nuance. Where pupils can name and explain a character’s mixed emotional drivers. That is how you prepare them for a key stage four curriculum. That is why you need at least one anti-hero. 

So often we have a misguided approach to preparing pupils to study difficult texts in key stage four. We prepare them for studying Macbeth by teaching them Romeo and Juliet, and just sort of hoping Shakespearean language rubs off on them. When let’s be real, the only phrase mine learnt from that entire play was what it means to bite your thumb at someone else. You prepare for teaching Macbeth better if you teach three lessons on the part of the lion king where Scar takes over the pride lands and ruins them as he becomes increasingly maniacal. Though you might have to watch a clip from Simba’s Pride to convince them that Scar was once ever good. We should be aiming for pupil work that sounds like this:

“Scar’s inevitable downfall comes as he repeatedly makes foolish choices out of his fear and insecurity. He felt the pressure to be something greater than normal, and had a level of jealousy that would eventually lead him to become a cold blooded killer. His hamartia was that he could never stand not being the best. This ludicrous expectation, which was completely illogical, meant he would always fail eventually. No one can seriously expect themselves to be the best. By definition, virtually everyone who thinks that way will be disappointed. Being excellent is a reasonable ambition, having to always beat everybody else means he was always bound to be hurt.”

is soooooooooooo much more valuable than getting them to be able to say.

“Romeo is very emotional. I know this because of when it says ”tempt not a desperate man”. This shows he is desperate and at the end of his patience”

The problem is, lurking in the back of teacher minds is the fear that pupils will become prone to waffle, and just describe the story instead of giving reasoned arguments. But that’s because they’re not practiced in teaching pupils how to reason and interpret. There’s a big black hole in English teacher training around this. I should probably help fix that. (The Key to PGCE + THE ECT Vault are the current training programs on offer. They seem like the perfect place to pop a couple of modules on this.)

🟪Benefits of anti-heroes

Anti heroes help you point out the causality between action and consequence just as well as a tragic hero, only they’re a bit more hopeful. Macbeth is fine, but tragic heroes are also too easy to dismiss for year 7. They are more suited for older pupils who can identify more with the characters.

An anti-hero helps make students:

If you’re designing a scheme on an anti hero it’s worth thinking about these points and structuring your big questions or titles around them. They provide great opportunities for discussion or silent debate. Just remember to take notes as you go because even pupils who debate excellently will struggle to recall the points made once the discussion is over.

🟪3 Anti-Heroes That Actually Work with Year 7

Here are three character options you can plug straight into a sequence for year 7

1. Flynn rider - Tangled

2. Shrek/ Donkey/ Puss in Boots

3. Kevin McCallister - Home Alone

If your pupils are like mine and are obsessed with anything from the 80's or 90's feel free to use some throwback films like Crocodile Dundee, the Mighty Ducks or Home alone, but remember you are slipping back into the sands of time, and they will likely need a long clip to get their heads round it.

If you’re looking for an actual book to study rather than a sequence of lessons about the character type, perhaps try Solo the Star wars book/film combo about Han’s backstory. It’s by far the most accessible star wars book, and he is an absolute classic of an anti-hero. If you want an amusing book maybe try Terry Pratchett, perhaps Equal rights, though it is hard to choose what they will find funny and what is too grown up and hard to read. If you’ve got low reading ages, this might be too hard.

🟪How to Scaffold Anti-Hero Discussions

One of the most common objections to using anti-heroes in Year 7 is the fear that students “aren’t ready” for moral ambiguity. But they are — you just need to scaffold them so they can write about it. They will find putting their ideas into words rather tricky, but that’s the entire point. That’s what they will always find tricky until it’s addressed.

Here’s how to make it manageable:

💠Use sentence stems

"He was brave, but..."

"She did the right thing, even though..."

"He meant well, but the outcome was..."

These open up space for nuanced thought without overwhelming pupils.

Feel free to also give them sentence stems that help them to actually be polite. They often need help explaining their ideas respectfully.

“I see what you’re saying, but have you thought about...

“That’s a good point, can I add to it the idea that...

💠Ask open moral questions, but then give them sub points to hit. Make the sub points ‘What’ questions. Pupils find it easier to respond specifically to ‘whats’. Without them, these kinds of questions on their own are too broad. They’ll produce stunted answers.

“Did they do the right thing — or just what worked?”

“Were they being kind, or just avoiding blame?”

These questions are too broad, some pupils will get stuck and arrive simply at yes or no answers. But if you just turn them into ‘whats’ they’ll stand a better chance.

“What reasons did they have for doing X?”

“What motivated them to say X? Think about what were they trying to achieve and what they were trying to avoid.”

You’ll be amazed what Year 7s come out with once they feel confident to explore both sides. You don’t want to give them any wiggle room in the question to answer it with just a yes or a no.

💠Use visual scales and thought maps

Draw up scales/number lines from ‘selfish’ to ‘selfless’, or ‘brave’ to ‘reckless’. Let students plot characters’ actions and evaluate why they didn’t put one number higher or one number lower.

🟫Common Missteps to Avoid

Anti-heroes can unlock powerful discussions — but only if you avoid these pitfalls:

🚫 Choosing someone too complex

Macbeth is a tragic hero, and not an ideal anti-hero for Year 7. There’s too much contextual baggage. Year 7 are not going to be ready for debates about whether someone feels secure in their manhood. Stick to accessible characters with obvious, age appropriate, inner conflict.

🚫 Glorifying harm

Anti-heroes often do the wrong thing — but make sure you address the impact of those actions. Don’t let charm excuse cruelty.

🚫 Throwing them in without scaffolding

If you give students an ambiguous character but no support, they’ll default to “good or bad” labels. Use journals, talk prompts, and sentence starters to help them navigate the grey areas.

🟧 Summary 

Anti-heroes help Year 7 pupils explore moral complexity in a way that’s more hopeful and age-appropriate than tragic heroes.

Empathy and nuanced reasoning are the real goals of Year 7, not just learning PEA or hunting for quotations.

Skip the gimmicks. Pre-select quotations and focus on helping pupils reason and explain, not just spot.

Use sentence stems, ‘what’ questions, and visual scales to scaffold tricky character analysis.

Choose accessible anti-heroes with clear motivations, not overly complex or context-heavy ones.