The frequent changes to the way English has been examined, assessed and taught have done little to address the problems many teachers and pupils still experience in the classroom. Ask any teacher with more than ten yearsâ experience and they will tell you that they have seen numerous methods and practices enthusiastically ushered in, only to fall out of favour, and then return in a slightly different guise some years later. In education, ideas and practices tend to eventually come full circle. We repeat mistakes and reinvent wheels, sometimes the wrong wheels, because we are constrained by time and misled into short-term, surface fixes rather than identifying and wrestling with problems at a deeper level. It is also true that most of us only know the history of English teaching from the point at which we joined the profession onwards. We spend little or no time reflecting on patterns of successes and failures over the last century or beyond.
We have not been short of dedicated, passionate teachers who want the very best for their pupils. Like many others, we embraced any new ideas and approaches, attended training in and out of school time, planned new schemes of work, scoured examinerâs reports to understand how to improve our teaching and then did it all again when the specifications or frameworks â or both â changed. Unfortunately, passion isnât enough. Sometimes, âpassionâ is problematic, if it leads to surety rather than self-doubt, reflection and discussion.
There is little evidence that this constant change has led to any meaningful improvement in outcomes for pupils in English because the attainment gap has increased rather than decreased. According to the Education Policy Instituteâs recent report on trends in educational attainment and disadvantage, the most disadvantaged pupils in England have fallen further behind their peers and are now on average over two full years of learning behind non-disadvantaged pupils by the end of secondary. In general, the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more advantaged peers is closing but it is closing so slowly, it will take a full 50 years before we reach any kind of equity.1 This does not include predicted further widening of the gap due to the current coronavirus pandemic. That disadvantaged pupils have fallen so far behind is such an important metric because it tells us weâre letting down those pupils who need us most. These issues are tied up in complex social problems that we cannot hope to fully unpick in this book, and some of them are not specific to English, but clearly there is much work to be done to turn the tide.
While it may feel controversial to say so, socio-economic status is still the biggest determinant of academic success. Those who have more advantages at home might still need us, but they usually need us less than those pupils from low-income households. The advantaged are often successful despite what schools do. This enables leaders and teachers to kid themselves that what theyâre doing is effective. If we want to know whether a school is truly effective, we should prioritise looking at data pertaining to the most disadvantaged cohorts. If those pupils are not progressing well, then probably no pupil is doing as well as they really could.
Within this context, English inhabits a space which for teachers can feel particularly pressurised. Sometimes it seems that we are expected to achieve far more than is specified on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) syllabus â not just to develop our pupilsâ reading and writing literacy (which sometimes means actually teaching them to read and write in the first place) but to also give them enough conceptual and contextual knowledge to close the disadvantage gap, to help them to become lifelong readers, to communicate with and make meaning from the world around them. We want all of these outcomes for our pupils, as well as the grades at the end of Year 11, but sometimes it can feel overwhelming when we consider what we are expected to achieve in only five or six periods a week, or fewer. There is even greater pressure on English teachers because of the importance of pupil outcomes to schools, and because our subject is especially well placed to improve outcomes in other subjects too. And some of that pressure we put upon ourselves, because we want our pupils to see so much more in our subject than can be measured by an exam. We know that English offers powerful and meaningful ways to interpret the world, to find joy and beauty in language, to broaden our human experience. Many of us know these things because we were taught them by an inspiring teacher ourselves.
Constant change has been driven by a quest for improvement, but most of these changes have at best made little difference, and at worst, exacerbated the problems further. At the heart of the trouble with English sits a number of persistent problems â those tricky, knotty issues with which many pupils seem to struggle, and that we teachers habitually encounter but often fail to resolve. With such complex problems, there are rarely simple answers, although far too often we make the mistake of applying sticking plaster solutions.
What are the persistent problems in English?
To address these endemic problems, we need to first identify the key things that create the struggle. Letâs start by examining the main things many pupils find difficult before we dig deeper to uncover some underlying causes.
Many find it difficult to think conceptually
Like all academic subjects, English is full of conceptual abstractions. We have thematic concepts such as power, betrayal and love, as well as more foundational disciplinary concepts such as genre and characterisation. Pupils often write about characters as if they are real people. Itâs not as if they donât know that these characters are constructs â if you ask them, they can tell you that Scrooge isnât a real person â but because a good book mirrors something about real life so convincingly, this essential underlying concept gets lost. To be immersed in a good book is to be immersed in a different world; real life is left behind. That can be a good thing in helping pupils engage with and enjoy texts, but it can also be a barrier to seeing English as an academic subject. If pupils canât âseeâ characterisation, for example, as a conceptual tool to create meaning, then their ability to understand texts is limited, which spoils the experience for them and might hold them back in their examinations.
Pupils struggle to make connections
As well as being conceptual, English is also full of interconnected information. For example, when studying Of Mice and Men pupils need to be able to connect Steinbeckâs characterisation of Curleyâs wife with his bigger ideas about social injustice, and to make further connections with the real world. And it is helpful for pupils to see that texts relate to one another as well. Many other texts explore the theme of social injustice, such as An Inspector Calls and A Christmas Carol, for example. Seeing connections between texts, themes and concepts in English helps pupils understand the subject as a discipline. And, as we will demonstrate later in this book, all pupils have the potential to develop a disciplinary schema, to study English as academics, if we expose them to those insights.
Pupils lack creativity and struggle to think of ideas
Pupils often produce stories that are entirely plot and have little description or characterisation. Or they might struggle to come up with a meaningful thesis statement for an essay. Rhetorical writing might be reduced to a box-ticking exercise where pupils try to use âlists of threeâ (known technically as tricolons) and rhetorical questions without really understanding why or how to employ them effectively. And a possible reason for this lack of creativity is insufficient knowledge about underlying concepts and about the real world. Sometimes it can feel that, as English teachers, we are expected to teach everything about human experience.
Pupils struggle to write in enough depth and detail to fully articulate their ideas
Pupils often stop short just at the point that their essay was becoming interesting. It might feel like they will never be ready to do the thinking for themselves. We try to support them with scaffolds and acronyms such as Point, Evidence, Explanation (PEE), but it doesnât seem to work and the scaffolding can never quite be removed. And how often do pupils say, âI know what I mean but I donât know how to write it downâ? Too often they become dependent on the scaffolding we provide. We explore models of writing with pupils but they donât necessarily apply any of what we have discussed. Sometimes we might attribute this to poor behaviour and sometimes it might be, but often there is something else going on that causes a disconnect between how we hope our pupils will write and what actually happens when they try to apply our teaching. Often, we simply have not modelled clearly enough. There were too many disruptions and interruptions, or too much happened inside the teacherâs head rather than out loud, for pupils to clearly follow our thinking.
Pupils forget
Many are the lessons when we have been tempted to scream, âBut we did this yesterday!â And they forget all kinds of things as well. Below is a list of some of the things pupils seem to forget:
names of characters
what a metaphor is
relevant context
effective ways of starting an essay
how to use basic punctuation
a decent explanation of why writers use settings (they fall back on âit sets the sceneâ or, âit paints a pictureâ with alarming predictability).
Sadly, willing pupils to remember and believing that they should has never manifested in any actual improvement in pupilsâ retention. There is certainly an argument that they didnât grasp it in the first place but we often recall the exact same pupils being able to articulate these things at one time, usually right after weâve just explained it. So why doesnât stuff, âgo inâ over the long-term? The move to linear courses has exacerbated this problem because there is so much more for pupils to remember.
When writing essays, we want pupils to remember everything about the text, work out an effective way to organise their ideas and then get on with it without even thinking about asking us for a sentence starter or an essay plan. They should, eventually, be able to do this on their own. But often, they donât seem to move beyond needing teacher support. The stabilisers never really come off.
And we would also really like our pupils to be able to work effectively and independently in groups, rather than one person doing all the work, or the whole group getting stuck unless weâre constantly directing them, or the pupils turning in a response that is just disappointing compared to what we had been hoping for. There is a gap between knowing and doing in that pupils have understood something about these models, or at least they appear to have understood, but they are not applying that knowledge.
If we are ever to address these problems, we need to look at why they exist in the first place. This means digging more deeply into the underlying causes so that we avoid any further change without improvement.
Why have we not been able to resolve these persistent problems?
There is a lack of time and headspace
The culture of high pressure and constant change with its emphasis on data and performance, coupled with our spending too much time on marking, has meant there is little space left for genuine reflection or research. English is a vast subject and most teachers have knowledge gaps that require time and opportunity to address.
CPD is lacking and sometimes irrelevant
Where we have had opportunities to engage with professional development, it has rarely had much impact because of a lack of subject specificity and a lack of evidence-informed approaches to teacher training. These generic approaches and fads often leave us with little we can really use. Lack of effective Continuing Professional Development (CPD) leads to a lack of parity for pupils, which we explore further below.
There is a conflict between our desire to teach English authentically and a ruthless assessment system
We informally measure progress intuitively through our relationships with pupils, but the school data machine requires constant performance checks and data collection which often seem inaccurate and impede real learning. There is a conflict between our wanting to teach authentically and our wanting to prepare pupils for examinations.
To explain what we mean by this, it might be helpful to consider how different teachers approach poetry. The same probably applies to novels and plays but it is poetry where the tension is often at its most intense. Some teachers prioritise teaching pupils to experience and enjoy poetry. Others focus on preparing them for an exam question. Of course, we mostly try to do both but we will each tend to lean slightly to one extreme or the other. This choice, often unconscious, determines the approach we take. But do we realise how different, and how at odds, these two approaches might be? Appreciating a poem might require very little instruction, or none at all. Our appreciation might be instinctive, it might not make sense, it might be âwrongâ in the sense that how weâve responded is unlikely to be an accurate interpretation of what the author was really thinking. This is rather beautiful. Our strange instincts and the somewhat inexplicable and deeply personal connections we make are the reason many of us love literature and especially poetry.
However, this approach doesnât fit well with passing an examination in which we will need to identify an important meaning, a thread that we can follow and illuminate through careful exemplification. We want pupils to be exploratory without undermining their overall interpretation, to know when an âalternative interpretationâ might be appropriate and meaningful and when it is actually deeply helpful because it conflicts with the overall argument. We need to be purposeful and our argument needs to be valid if we are to achieve the highest grades. By valid, we tend to mean there has to be an internal logical consistency to our argument and (usually) it should feel like the author would be on our side â our interpretation might not be exactly what they intended, if they even know what exactly they intended, but it would not jar or cause offence. There are occasional exceptions to this, especially if an authorâs representation of a group is problematic.
Of course, the best essays are a mixture of those shared meanings we will all recognise within a particular poem, carefully elucidated and the personal insights of an engaged individual. In truth, teaching poetry probably takes both approaches. There needs to be a willingness to engage with and explore an instinct wherever it might lead, and an ability to know when and how to tame that instinct and develop it into an academically framed analysis. A balance should be struck between the teacher using their expertise to support and guide pupils, and space for those pupils to find their own nuances in the poem.
It helps us as teachers to acknowledge this consciously and explain to pupils that there is more than one way to respond to a poem depending on whether or not we are preparing for an examination. This allows us to enjoy those personal moments while also reminding pupils that some of our ideas wouldnât necessarily work in an actual essay because they wouldnât allow us to create a consistent interpretation or âstoryâ of the text for the examiner. While teachers have some sense of this, of course, that balance is a difficult one to strike and many of us would like to collaborate more and discuss ways forward with other like-minded colleagues. There is usually little time for this, sadly.
Top-down approaches stifle autonomy and creativity
School leaders may not have received much, if any, training about how pupils learn in English, which ...
