The Challenge of English in the National Curriculum

Peter King, Robert Protherough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781138411234
• eBook ISBN: 9781134876082
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Challenge of English in the National Curriculum considers how particular aspects of a national curriculum can be reconciled with the best practice of the English teaching tradition. The authors are all practising teachers who look at the lessons of the past as well as their hopes for the future. Each chapter begins from a question raised by teachers when asked at in-service workshops about the issues which concerned them most. The chapters cover most of the more significant aspects of English within the National Curriculum and vary from John Johnson's survey of practical ways to raise the standard of oracy to Nick Peim's suggestions for coping with Key Stage 4 which leads him to a radical questioning of the whole nature of English as a curriculum subject.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Whose curriculum?

Robert Protherough and Peter King

WHOSE CURRICULUM AND WHOSE ENGLISH?

A fairy story. Once upon a time in the Land of Ing the people all did things in their own way, and they argued all the time about which way was best. The Good Fairy got so tired of all their squabbles that she waved her wand and up popped a Magic Curriculum. ‘That’s the way to do it’, said the Good Fairy. ‘Hurrah!’ shouted the people. So then they all did things the way the Magic Curriculum said, and they all lived happily ever after. The end.

Well, it was a fairy story, wasn’t it? The imposing style in which a ‘national’ curriculum was launched may have led some teachers to expect an authoritative and almost permanent statement of principles and practice that all teachers could happily follow. If so, then recent events have shown how misguided they were. It is now impossible to talk of the National Curriculum as something definitive. Within five years, four irreconcilable versions of a National Curriculum for English have been promulgated (together with an additional variant for Wales) and five committees or working parties have been charged with drafting or revising these documents without ever reaching consensus. The ‘revised’ Order of 1993 was far more than a revision of Cox’s; it was actually grounded in a quite different philosophy from his and embodied different views of what talking, reading and writing actually mean. It is plain, therefore, that even if there may be general agreement about the principle of establishing a written curriculum for English, such a text will have to be tentative, continually changing and evolving, and will have to be adapted to meet the particular needs of different schools and teachers. Those of us who have prepared policy documents and schemes of work (even, in the old days, ‘syllabuses’) for English departments know that they were always out of date by the time an agreed version was written down, that they were constantly needing to be revised. If we waited until the work on the National Curriculum was ‘complete’, then we would wait for ever.

As is argued in Chapter 3, we cannot now read any document like English in the National Curriculum (DES/WO, 1990) as an innocent set of pedagogic guidelines. There are three main reasons for this. First, notions of ‘English’ and of language have been given a heavy ideological weight. Conflicting social, economic and political forces all make claims on what should count as literacy and how it is to be acquired, and have increasingly dictated the terms in which that debate is carried on. As a subject English has provided the clearest site on which opposing views within the education debate of the last decade could draw up their battle lines. It was the political débâcle over imposed testing arrangements for English in late spring 1993 that brought in support from unions, head teachers, parents and many outsiders concerned for education. The revolt soon became unstoppable and led first to a national boycott of the tests and ultimately to the setting up of the Dearing Review of the National Curriculum and its assessment as a face-saving device for the embattled Secretary of State for Education.

Second, attempts to define and to control what goes on in English have increasingly plainly been seen as attacks on teachers’ professionalism. Because English lessons consist of talking, reading and writing, then any attempt to legislate for these activities has a more profound effect on what teachers actually do in the classroom than curriculum proposals do in any other subject area. It has to be understood that the protests of English teachers have been less about the obvious overloading of their time than about the sustained governmental assault on their professionalism, the denigrating of experience and research evidence.

Third, proposals for the curriculum now have to be seen as statements about the resourcing of education. Teachers have detected a shift in balance away from the English classroom, not only in direct governmental intervention, but also in the indirect pressures on school cultures: the greater power of school management, the control of budgets and of in-service provision, the perceived need to ‘compete’ – all tending to define objectives, policy, resourcing from outside the English department, and thus reducing still further the autonomy of teachers. The unsteady structure of attainment targets, league tables, teacher appraisal, ‘parental choice’ of opted-out schools, links teaching and the curriculum to the funding of schools and the salaries of teachers.

From the English teacher’s viewpoint, therefore, these years of attempting to understand and implement an ever-shifting curriculum and assessment system have been years of chaos, frustration and anger. Much of that frustration has been caused by trying to argue educational principles against individuals and bodies who are working solely to a political agenda. For example, there were the serious disagreements with SEAC and the DfE over the principles on which the testing system was built. Teachers argued that the national tests were ill-conceived with no proven evidence of their reliability or validity, but they were confronting a political agenda of forcing simplistic accountability on schools through national league tables. Their concern at being increasingly reduced to operatives who delivered someone else’s curriculum was brought into sharp focus by the NCC Review, instigated by the Secretary of State in late 1992. Many teachers objected to the way in which political pressure groups were being encouraged in their attempts to hijack the curriculum in ways which denied the practical good sense of teachers and which pushed aside the principles on which the original Cox committee’s report had sought to establish agreement (‘enabling rather than restricting’, ‘starting point not a straitjacket’). The members of the review team, experienced in teaching English, were not free agents; they were overseen by a Review Group ‘which guided the detailed work from a policy perspective’. Although other teachers were ‘consulted’ by the NCC, it is no secret that any advice they gave that conflicted with the official stance was ignored and not even reported. Similarly, in the Dearing Review process the advice of the English working group on some points was simply overruled by the SCAA committee. Political and administrative considerations have been allowed to dominate educational and professional ones.

The experiences of recent years have therefore made teachers healthily sceptical about centralised policies for English, and they find themselves oddly aligned with the one-time DES spokesman Michael Fallon, who says that ‘a prescriptive curriculum is a nonsense in a free society’. Even more oddly, they find that Sheila Lawlor pins the blame for the National Curriculum not on the government but on them. It is, she writes, ‘the organ for enforcing an educational consensus on all’ and has been ‘systematically imposed on the content and method of teaching by the regiments of the education “service”: teacher trainers, inspectors, education officials and theorists, exam boards and teachers’ (The Observer, 20 February 1994). It is a strange contortion of events to see teachers imposing a prescriptive curriculum on the country rather than the other way round!

This introduction was written at a time when the Dearing Review put on temporary hold the process of ceaseless change, and therefore offered a suitable time to consider what a curriculum for English might be like.

The sections that follow suggest why English has traditionally been a focus for controversy, place current disputes in a wider context, consider how the curricular debate has posed a threat to professionalism, and finally look ahead to encourage English teachers to reassert the values in which they believe.

WHY ENGLISH IS CONTROVERSIAL

There are good reasons that controversy has particularly centred on the form and place of English in the National Curriculum and that the 1993 boycott of testing was largely driven by objections to the form of the English tests.

The reasons are inherent in the nature of the subject and its teaching, and five significant points can be briefly outlined.

• First, English is contentious because of the importance generally attached to the subject and related concepts of ‘Englishness’. This is not simply because it is seen as ‘central’ and ‘indispensable’ in the curriculum, ‘the only basis possible for a national education’ (as the Newbolt Report put it in 1921), affecting the learning that goes on in all areas and offering essential preparation for adult working life. Arguments about how children should speak and write, what they should read, or what knowledge of language they should have, are really arguments about how education should shape young people’s views of the world. Controlling English is seen as one way of controlling society. Professor Cox has rightly said that ‘a National Curriculum in English is intimately involved with questions about our national identity, indeed with the whole future ethos of British society. The teaching of English … affects the individual and social identity of us all’ (Cox, 1990, p. 2). Some groups who share this belief wish to impose a curriculum or methodology that will force particular values down the throats of students or their teachers (as is illustrated in Chapter 4 among others). Such a wish is blind to the fact that English resists being used in such a doctrinaire way, because the shared language that we all speak is essentially uncontrollable, as are our reactions to what we read. ‘The work of English teaching involves continual pressing for the expression of alternative ideas, inviting challenge to received opinions, seeking strong personal responses, establishing debate’ (Protherough and Atkinson, 1991, p. 15).

• Second, what we conventionally call ‘English’ is controversial because of the continuing debate about just what the subject really is (this is taken further in Chapter 11). Many studies have pointed to its ‘unique’ or ‘special’ nature, and it is particularly difficult to tie down neatly on paper a subject where there is no real consensus about its content and boundaries. In recent years, direct and indirect pressures have brought about changes in the definition of the subject, its principles and practice, and the shape of its curriculum. Most immediately, English has been reshaped by developments within the profession. These have included teachers’ reactions to educational development and research and the dissemination of new classroom approaches through professional organisations like NATE. Teachers have reacted in different ways to the widening of such concepts as ‘text’ or ‘literature’ and to the shifting boundaries between their subject and Drama and Media (or Cultural) Studies (a topic addressed in of this volume). The Cox Report pointed out that there are at least five distinct models of ‘English’, each with its own particular emphasis, that currently animate the work of different teachers. There are particular difficulties in balancing the different contributions that English is expected to make to so many ‘areas of experience’ in the curriculum. English draws its theoretical support from a whole range of disciplines, the social sciences and sciences like linguistics as well as humanities and the arts; it is concerned with the personal and subjective as well as the objective. It is therefore particularly hard to fit such a subject into any generalised view of the curriculum that treats all subjects as alike, as though all can equally be defined in terms of behavioural objectives, ten-level sequential development and skills that can be neatly defined and tested.

• Third, English is contentious because of its particular openness and responsiveness to influences from society and its shifting educational goals. Policies for English have to be framed and evolve in changing local, national and global contexts. Shifting views of the function of education in general (the relative importance attached to preparation for work in a competitive economy, socialisation within a cultural heritage, or personal development and pleasure in learning) significantly affect the way that English is realised. It is a subject about which expectations are rightly high, and allegations of falling ‘standards’ in reading or inaccurate spelling can always make headlines in the popular press. In part this is because English is a subject about which everybody feels entitled to have an opinion, from the heir to the throne downwards, unlike Physics or German, say. So it is that, for example, in recent years English teachers have responded to the pressures from different groups to frame a curriculum more concerned for the rights and needs of ethnic minorities, to reshape conventional assumptions about gender, to offer the higher levels of functional literacy thought to be required in industrial societies, and to prepare students to exploit information technology (see Chapter 9). Simultaneously, and overlapping these direct pressures for change in subject English, it has been influenced by the growing sense of world crisis, the communications explosion and wider social developments. English teachers, like others, feel themselves faced by greater questioning of their professionalism, demands for accountability in times of recession, more vocal concern for parental rights, the vision of education as a lifelong process. English lessons are increasingly grappling with broader issues like concern for the environment, nationalist conflicts, social mobility and unemployment, or the problems of juvenile crime. Any national policy for English has to be framed within the context of a particular society, culture and time, and must model those choices that may be possible within the material constraints of factors like budgets, buildings, teacher supply, and student enrolment. It is manifestly difficult to create a coherent English policy within a culture that is itself socially divided, that lacks common values and that has no shared view of educational goals.

• Fourth, English is controversial because it calls into question conventional methods and criteria of assessment. It was no accident that English teachers were among the first and the strongest proponents of coursework assessment and were sceptical of the value of narrow skills-based testing. An English programme has many possible criteria for success, and it is extremely difficult to decide how far any of them have been met. If the aim is to produce individuals who are sensitive, articulate, responsive, imaginative, reflective language users, then when are they believed to have reached that point? When can the programme be said to have ‘succeeded’? Teachers of language are by training equipped to be sceptical of those perennial slogans (‘restoring the basic skills’) consisting of resonant emotional metaphors that can be adapted to a range of meanings. Nobody can be against ‘raising standards’ or removing ‘inequalities’ in the name of ‘social justice’ or pressing for ‘excellence’. All depends on the measures that are proposed to achieve these laudable aims. How precisely are their effects to be assessed? Attempts at monitoring can lead to an overemphasis on those goals that can be measured and those results or skills that can be tested as is argued in Chapter 6.

• Fifth, English is controversial because of the distinct way in which its teachers see themselves and their work. This is not simply because by training they are likely to be articulate and prepared to look critically at proposals that affect them. From the time of the Newbolt Report onwards, English teachers have traditionally had a ‘high’ view of their role as concerned with changing lives rather than simply imparting knowledge. Effective English teachers see themselves as ‘different’ from teachers of other subjects, marked by a distinct personal relationship with their subject and their students. In a recent survey, over half believed that they worked in the classroom in ways that marked them off from others. In considering potential entrants to the profession 80 per cent of them saw qualities of personality and attitude as the dominant qualifications. It is also significant that the most important influence on their development as teachers was seen as other English teachers (rather than their studies, advisers or professional tutors) which – together with a high ranking for professional associations – suggests the importance they attached to a co-operative learning community and a sense of group solidarity (Protherough and Atkinson, 1991, chapters 1 and 2). As will be suggested in following sections, the evolution of an English curriculum and its associated methodology had until recently taken place within that community.The enquiry cited in Protherough and Atkinson (1991) found that the successful teachers surveyed, although very different in background and educational experience, described changes in their own practice in very similar terms that embodied the implicit values of that particular cultural group. Although they were well aware of the need for English programmes to have what they called ‘structure’, ‘coherence’ and ‘sequence’, what they valued for themselves was the ‘freedom’, ‘variety’, ‘range’ and ‘diversity’ available to English teachers. It is not surprising, then, that when asked what the most urgent problems were that faced English teachers, the most frequent response was to mention the coming of the National Curriculum, seen in terms of ‘imposed’ models and ‘interference’ with teachers’ autonomy (Protherough and Atkinson, 1991, Chapter 9).

THE CONTEXT OF POLICY FRAMING IN ENGLISH

The short history of English as a subject is largely the story of successive attempts at particular moments to give some form to an ever-changing stream of ideas about how the subject is to be learned and taught. Such policies, of which models for the curriculum form a part, always look in two directions: diagnosing on the basis of the past and prescribing for an uncertain future. For implementation they depend on a degree of accord between policy-makers, administrators, teachers and society as a whole (and, of course, policies for English are ultimately inseparable from policies for other subjects and for education generally).

The continuing consultations and reviews of the curriculum have always posed a number of questions. First, what is to be the balance between centralised and regional or local decision-making? There has always been a ‘triangle of tension’ between central government, local administration and individual schools and colleges. Second, whose voices should be heard in framing a policy and which should be dominant? Third, what is the relationship between the formulation of policy and its actual implementation, and how will that be monitored? Fourth, what is to be the balance between professional approaches to the framing of policy, concentrating on input (the style and quality of teaching; the motivation, skills and training of English teachers) and the bureaucratic, emphasising output (assessing the efficiency of the system by testing, norm-referencing and benchmarks)? Our argument is that the answers given to these questions since the 1980s have been radically different from those offered at any earlier time, and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Whose curriculum?
• 2. Can we raise the standard of speaking and listening?
• 3. What is a reading curriculum?
• 4. How do we teach pre-twentieth-century literature?
• 5. What is the range of writing?
• 6. Can we assess and keep sane?: A personal view
• 7. How do we teach grammar?
• 8. How can we teach Shakespeare?
• 9. What use are the new technologies?
• 10. What is left of drama and media?
• 11. Key Stage 4: Back to the future?
• Index