Everything you need to teach Once Before I Go for the Leaving Cert English Comparative Study (Higher Level) in one download: the Student Textbook your class reads from, the Teacher Guide you prepare from, and the free Text Suitability Guide alongside them.

London, 2019. Daithí is sixty and newly sober, packing up a flat he emptied to pay for a drug habit and sharing it with Jase, a twenty-two-year-old trans man he took in after talking him off a bridge. Lynn arrives after twenty-five years of silence, carrying wine and her brother’s ashes. Then the play goes back — to Dublin in 1987, where the three are young, broke and political. Three parts, no scene divisions, about ninety minutes, with camp, drag and live music built into the form. As a comparative choice it arrives with its own control group: the same people in a society that criminalised them and one that legalised them, with every institution named on both sides. Add reverse chronology, a set that peels away on stage, doubled casting by age, and an ending that continues rather than resolves. The bundle covers all four Higher Level modes (Cultural Context, Literary Genre, Theme or Issue, and General Vision and Viewpoint), and every comparison point is partner-agnostic, so the set works whatever texts you pair the play with.

What’s included (three PDF files)

• Student Textbook (30 pages): the play analysed in continuous prose students can read independently. Each mode chapter opens with a “Reading for this mode” primer and “What the examiners ask”, works through the play’s key moments with close readings and key-moment tables, and closes with a sample comparative paragraph the student completes with their second text, “Setting this text against others” notes, and a comparison grid: the Once Before I Go column filled in, the Text 2 and Text 3 columns left for their own combination. Eight original, SEC-style practice questions, two per mode, end the book. References are given by part and page, since the play has no scene divisions. Licensed for the purchasing teacher to copy for their own students.
• Teacher Guide (24 pages): your preparation, done. A full, page-referenced sensitive-content briefing and practical notes before you teach; the play read for the teacher, from story and structure to the outlook; a key-moments bank and a quotation and reference bank holding the sixteen quotations that do the most work, every entry referenced by part and page; each mode broken down into what examiners reward, where the play is strong, what to teach and the errors to pre-empt; a workable teaching sequence built for a play told out of order; notes on running the textbook’s grids, sample paragraphs and practice questions in class; coupling guidance for choosing partner texts; assessment essentials (PCLM marking, the PEAL paragraph shape, timing); and question-angle banks drawn from recent SEC papers.
• Text Suitability Guide (2 pages, free): the at-a-glance overview: synopsis, themes, sensitive content, and the play’s strengths in the comparison modes at both Higher and Ordinary Level.

The comparison grid rows are identical across every Prescribed Shelf comparative Student Textbook, so if your other texts are covered too, the three books line up row by row for your exact text combination.

Buy the bundle and save on the separate prices. Written by a practising teacher.