How long a text actually stays on the VCE English list.

Data: VCAA text lists 2018, 2021–2027 · updated 31 August 2026

If you are after the lists themselves rather than the pattern behind them, the 2026 and 2027 text lists are set out in full, each title with its tenure count and which eight leave after the 2026 exam.

The stated rule

VCAA’s text list document is direct about its own intent: roughly a quarter of the list turns over each year, and no text is meant to stay long.

“The text list must be reviewed annually, with approximately 25% of the texts being changed. Typically, texts will not appear on the list for more than four consecutive years.”VCE English/EAL text list, 2027 edition

What actually happens: mostly the rule, almost exactly

I tracked every List 1 title across the eight lists and recorded the moment each one dropped off — 30 departures in total across six adjacent-year transitions. The median departure happens at exactly four years, and the concentration is stark: 27 of the 30 (90%) leave in precisely their fourth year — the ceiling the guidelines describe as typical turns out to be close to a hard boundary in practice.

The four texts that went past four years

On List 1, no text was observed departing past four years at all. The texts that went further all sat on the old List 2 — the paired-text list that ran to 2023. Exactly four titles passed the four-year mark on record, and all four reached a printed tenure of six on the 2023 list before departing together at the 2023–2024 changeover.

They were not breaking the rule, which is the more interesting finding. The tenure paragraph VCAA printed in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 lists said texts “typically” would not exceed four years, and then added an explicit exemption: due to the complications of List 2, at times texts may appear for five consecutive years — wording the 2023 list widened to “five or more”. All four peaked in 2023, while that exemption was in force. From the 2024 list onward VCAA deleted the exemption — and the two-year floor with it — leaving only the four-year sentence. So the ceiling these four passed was softer than the one that applies now. Registered as VCE-38.

VCE Literature, meanwhile, still hasn’t softened. Its 2026 and 2027 text lists carry the absolute form — notext will appear for more than four consecutive years, and none for fewer than two — though the lists don’t quite bear it out. Every 2026 Literature text sits at four years or below, and 29 of the 30 do in 2027; the exception is Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People, annotated five years in both the list and the bibliography of the same document that says no text will exceed four. One text is not a pattern, and it is the same kind of exception the four English texts above represent — but it is worth knowing that the stricter wording is not strictly kept. The likely reason for the wording difference is structural rather than editorial. The English exemption was granted “due to the complications of List 2”, the paired-text list; Literature has no List 2, it runs a single list of thirty texts, so the problem never arose. The practical upshot for a student choosing between the two subjects: a Literature text in its fourth year is a firmer bet to disappear than an English text in its fourth year. Registered as VCE-39.

What this means for choosing a text to study

A text that has already spent three years on the list is very likely to leave before a Year 11 student who studies it in Year 12 in 2028 can sit an exam question on it — the four-year rule is close to exact. A text in its first or second year, by contrast, has real runway. That has a direct, practical consequence for how a guide or resource written for a text is worth building: a new text’s expected examinable life is roughly three to four more years from the year it first appears, not an open-ended one.

One more thing the year-by-year lists don’t show on their own: a text that leaves never comes back. Across every transition from 2021 to 2027 there is not one case of a title departing and later returning. VCAA’s “approximately 25% changed annually” is delivered by replacement, not rotation — so a text that has dropped off is not worth holding onto in the hope it cycles back. Registered as VCE-40, which also shows the unarchived 2019–2020 gap is partly recoverable by arithmetic: four texts read tenure 1 in 2018 and tenure 4 in 2021, an increment of exactly three across three years, which is only possible if they were listed continuously throughout.

The full tracked dataset — every title, every year, every departure and arrival — is in the evidence register(VCE-35 and VCE-36). VCAA publishes the current and next year’s lists directly at vcaa.vic.edu.au, and the exam topics these texts are eventually tested on follow their own coded pattern, set out on the how topics are worded page.

Where each 2027 text sits in its run

VCAA prints a tenure count beside every title, which is the closest thing each text has to a published expiry date. Read against the four-year pattern above, the 2027 List 1 sorts into four groups — and the difference between the top group and the bottom one is roughly three years of examinable life.

The other list, and why 2028 looks different

The departure analysis above describes List 1 — the set texts studied for text response (the six-year exceptions sat on the old, pre-2024 List 2). The study design also carries a List 2 of mentor texts for Creating Texts, and it behaves nothing like List 1, because it has no history of rotating at all. List 2 first appears with the current study design in 2024, so its texts entered together and have aged together.

Sixteen of the twenty mentor texts are in their fourth year for 2027. If the four-year pattern holds as it has on List 1, most of the Creating Texts corpus is replaced at once for 2028 rather than a few titles at a time — which is the opposite of how List 1 behaves, and it matters for anyone building mentor-text resources: the shelf life of a List 2 resource written today is probably one year, not four.

Stated as a projection, not an announcement. VCAA has published nothing about the 2028 List 2, and its own wording is that texts “typically” do not stay beyond four years — a tendency, not a rule. The four exceptions above reached six years, so a fourth-year text is not certain to go. Registered as VCE-37, and deliberately falsifiable: when VCAA publishes the 2028 list, this either happened or it did not.

One development since that projection was written makes the caution less rhetorical. On 20 August 2026 VCAA opened a consultation headed “Proposal to extend the text cycle for the VCE English, VCE English as an Additional Language (EAL) and VCE Literature text lists”, with a survey that closed on 11 September 2026 (VCE-51). The notice states the subject and the deadline and nothing else — no proposed length, no implementation date — so it is not evidence the cycle is changing, and none of the measured history on this page changes because of it. What it does mean is that the rhythm every projection here extrapolates from is itself under review by the authority that sets it, which is a better reason to wait for the 2028 list than any argument from the data.

For a student, none of this changes the work: the text set is the text set, and what an examiner rewards in an essay about it does not rotate with the list. That craft is what weekly one-to-one VCE English tutoring is for, and how the two lists are examined — List 1 in Section A, List 2 mentor texts in Section B — is set out section by section.

The eleven-year examiner analysis is a PDF: what VCE English examiners keep saying. The whole shape of the paper is on the VCE English exam overview.