What went wrong with English teaching and who is really to blame?

A beginning, middle and end

Many writers, as well as teachers and parents, blame the slow death of English in schools on curriculum reforms introduced by Michael Gove when he was education secretary between 2010 and 2014. Authors including Anthony Horowitz, Mark Haddon and Anne Fine have warned that the way English is taught today — from instructing children to use “wow” words to testing their understanding of grammar — is switching pupils off reading and writing.

Now children “have to learn stuff people my age were never troubled with”, says Fine, a former children’s laureate and the author of Madame Doubtfire. “Terms like oxymoron, hyperbole, fronted adverbials — it can seem like just one long, miserable grind.”

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Ministers have insisted that schools should use phonics, the sounds of the alphabet, to teach reading, showing children how to combine the sounds to decipher words. The former schools minister Nick Gibb credits this method with helping to raise reading standards: in the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) England was one of only 11 countries not to have experienced a sharp drop in children’s reading ability since 2016. And this year Pirls revealed that children in England are the best readers in the western world, rising to fourth place in the international league table. However, critics say that this method of learning may have also discouraged children from reading books for enjoyment.

The young-adult author Adèle Geras, who wrote Troy, believes that use of smartphones and social media has damaged children’s “reading stamina”. “Reading a book requires you to give it your full attention and no child brought up in the age of the internet has full attention any more,” she says.

Horowitz laments particularly the decline of “that rite of passage, the shared book”, when each pupil in turn would read aloud from a novel during a class until they reached the story’s end, by which point “the entire class had enjoyed a book they might otherwise have thought too difficult”.

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The curriculum and the canon

The real damage, campaigners say, has been done in secondary schools, where Gove also reformed the teaching of English language and literature, which are compulsory GCSE subjects.“Now what students are asked to do for the exam is answer old-fashioned comprehension-style questions, including on a 19th-century text,” says the English Association’s spokesperson who is also an English teacher and a principal examiner in the subject.

For English literature, for example, Gove insisted that the John Steinbeck novella Of Mice and Men, once studied by 90 per cent of students, and other American classics, including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, should be dropped and replaced by British works mostly from before the 20th century, such as those by Charles Dickens.

“It seemed to be part of the push for British values in education, that the chance to study books from other cultures should be removed,” the spokesperson says. “The new choice of texts was uninspired, old-fashioned and inevitably teenagers struggled with them. They may be great works of art but it was a very narrow idea of the canon.”

In addition, he says, the way exam questions are formed encourages teachers to drill pupils to regurgitate model answers rather than to think for themselves.

“Instead of asking students to express their own opinions, the exam boards, led by the regulator, provided a series of bullet points that marks would be awarded for. So students have to say, for instance, that A Christmas Carol is a great book. They get marks too for saying something about the Victorian age in which it was written. As an examiner you often find students writing ‘all women suffered at the hands of men in the Victorian age’ in a GCSE exam.

“If they don’t answer in a formulaic way, identifying, for instance, metaphors or similes, they do not get the marks. They are not encouraged to think of their own creative individual response to the text.”

Rachel Roberts, who was an English teacher for ten years and is now an associate professor at Reading University, has surveyed the choice of works and found that with all exam boards teenagers have to answer questions on a Shakespeare play and texts from two of three other genres: poetry, the 19th-century novel and fiction or drama from the British Isles after 1914. In practice most schools choose to study the same texts.

Roberts has also compared today’s GCSE questions with those from the 1960s. “In the exam papers from the 1960s questions were framed as ‘How do you respond to this piece of writing/book?’ They were such open questions, inviting the child to come up with their own creative response.”

The present GCSE specification has been in place since 2015; the first exams were held in 2017. “Almost everyone does A Christmas Carol or Jekyll and Hyde, because they are short, plus a modern prose or drama text, which unfortunately often ends up being An Inspector Calls, which is not very modern,” Roberts says.

“Only in the past two, three years have exam boards provided more contemporary texts that have broader appeal, such as My Name Is Leon [a novel about a mixed-race child in foster care] by Kit de Waal. But schools cannot afford to buy scores of new books, so few are taking up the new options.”

Tracy Chevalier wants children to have more time and space to express themselves at school

ALAMY

Time is money

It is well reported that cutbacks are harming the arts, and the author Tracy Chevalier, who visits schools with the charity First Story to inspire children to write creatively, has noticed the damage.

“I love the idea of writers going into schools and giving kids the time and space and attention to express themselves,” she says. “The way the curriculum is set up now there is no time for that.”

Freddie Baverstock, head of English at Harris Westminster Sixth Form in central London, agrees that funding and resource cuts have dented enthusiasm for the subject. He says that his daughter found her English literature GCSE study of Romeo and Juliet boring. “But when she went to see the performance in the theatre she came back and said, ‘Wow!’ ”

Telling tales

Data shows that boys and ethnic minorities have particularly lost interest in English in recent years, with fewer numbers of both groups choosing to continue to study the subject. So how can we encourage children to love literature again?

Parents play a key role. The author Michael Morpurgo recalls his book-filled childhood. “I was read to every night by my mum, who was an actor,” he says. “She was guided by the instinct that if she loved a poem or a story, she wanted to tell me that story or read me that poem.” It was those nightly bedtime tales that inspired a lifelong “love of stories”.

Why does it matter?

Roberts polled 60 teenagers and asked them why they did not want to study English at A-level. She found that some “didn’t think it would get them a job”.

Mark Haddon, the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, says the drive by the government and many schools to encourage the study of Stem subjects is leading teenagers to think that reading literature is a waste of time. Nothing, he says, could be more misguided.

“We have, as a nation, fallen for the myth of “employability”, the idea that there are some subjects at school and university that will lead to more secure employment in higher-paying jobs, and others (the humanities, mostly) that will lead to a life of lower salaries in less desirable professions,” Haddon says. “This is simply not true.

“It is, I think, going to become more and more important. The same computer scientists who warned that jobs in the humanities would soon be taken over by AI are belatedly realising that it is their own jobs that are most under threat. AI, it turns out, is very good at computer programming … One of the things it is very bad at is ‘literary’ writing.

“ChatGPT will soon be able to churn out semi-serviceable genre novels, but I suspect that it will never be able to do what a Toni Morrison, an Annie Ernaux or a Jon Fosse are able to do, which is to push the envelope, to enlarge that corpus in thrilling, unexpected ways to give us that sense of a doorway being opened on to an entirely new landscape.

“English, at A-level and at university, is never just about reading and discussing literature. English is about history, it’s about psychology, it’s about philosophy, languages, sociology, theology … It’s about what makes us human.”

• The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
• Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
• Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes
• My Name Is Why by Lemn Sissay
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• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
• The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper
• Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

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