“It’s like pulling teeth,” a south London teacher said to me, as our toddlers dropped dinosaurs and bits of sausage on the floor. She was talking about teaching the 19th-century novel to her GCSE students - an undertaking that, for English teachers, draws attention to a serious contradiction in the recommendations of the recent Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR). Luckily, it’s one that Bridget Phillipson can resolve more easily than I can scoop up a plastic triceratops.
The contradiction is this. On the one hand, the CAR recommends evolutionary but still “significant” changes for English at GCSE: more diversity, “allowing more children to see themselves in the curriculum”; more teacher choice from “a broader range of texts and authors”. In other words, the CAR listened to teachers who critiqued the “dry” English curriculum.
On the other hand, when it comes to GCSE English Literature - the crucial point that actually shapes much of the curriculum and even more of the teaching - the CAR has left the key text choices basically unchanged: Shakespeare; some poetry, fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914; and one 19th-century novel.
On seeing this final detail, many people in the English subject community and awarding bodies felt like a parent whose carefully prepared sausages had been thrown from the table.
Leaving the 19th-century novel requirement in place creates gridlock for curriculum planners. It means there’s really nowhere for the diversity of newly chosen authors to go, except into a brief and tokenistic selection of poems. The devil is, as always, in the detail.
The 19th-century novel was put onto the curriculum in the last wave of reforms because these (often, but not always) wonderful books are a core part of English literary heritage, and provide a special degree of challenge and rigour. Everyone approves of these qualities in theory.
But in practice, there have been unintended consequences. The 19th-century novels actually taught are, on the whole, not selected because they are great works of human culture (no one does Middlemarch at GCSE), but because they are short. This means that teachers have chosen, and will choose, almost exclusively, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or A Christmas Carol. It’s not the “broader range” for which the CAR asks, and doesn’t offer much diversity.
There’s worse. Psychologists of reading Kathy Rastle and Maria Korochkina show that lots of the celebrated “challenging” vocabulary in these novels is difficult for even the most proficient student readers because it has passed out of use (who says “bedight”, “tetch”, “shorl” or “cloyment”?). Even educators deeply committed to expanding their classes’ vocabulary might feel a cloyment (“excessive gratification to the point of discomfort”).
Furthermore, economist of education Simon Burgess demonstrates, in gold-standard research, that the kind of dry “drill” teaching that teachers may feel obliged to offer to accompany these texts has a deleterious effect on students’ GCSE performance in English. By contrast, he establishes that English GCSE marks “are higher when teachers give more time to discussion and group work”. For this, you need more class conversation.
But one tiny, simple change would maintain the rigour, challenge and awareness of our literary heritage, while adding diversity, breadth, conversation and teacher autonomy. It would also reduce teacher workload (another thing the CAR recommends).
The DfE could just extend the range of this requirement by 60 years: instead of the 19th-century novel, mandate “the British novel from 1800 to 1960”.
The CAR wants students to know about “our rich literary heritage”. What wealth that additional 60-year period offers! Teachers could choose from the astonishingly creative period of British Modernism that includes writers such as Jean Rhys. Just like the writers of the 1920s and 30s, our students are living through an era of hyper-rapid change, and we can see our current transformations refracted in that fiction from a century ago.
Or, a teacher could choose something from the flourishing of British working-class writing of the 1920s to 1950s: Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, or Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Going up to 1960 would allow students to read fiction from World War II (George Orwell, Patrick Hamilton, Nancy Mitford, Noel Streatfeild, Daphne du Maurier), or from the Windrush period: Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Colin MacInnes. Potential novels in this period offer rigour and challenge, as well as explorations of diversity and culture from a wider, more gripping and engaging canon.
When we met with the DfE for the English Association, they made it clear that adapting any of CAR’s recommendations is up to the Minister.
If Bridget Phillipson makes this small but significant evolutionary change, she moves the dial of literary study by a generation and frees up the English curriculum for the wider benefits offered by the CAR. Conversely, the risk of accepting the CAR recommendation as it stands is gridlock for the English curriculum - a waste of the CAR’s good work on English. English teachers and curriculum planners welcome challenge, but they don’t want to be pulling teeth or forever picking up dropped sausages.
Robert Eaglestone is professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, and lead for cross-sector educational policy at The English Association
