Keeping English Alive
Keeping English Alive
Keeping English Alive
These are hard times for English.
Only today, in a now characteristic announcement via a compliant media, it appears that resit grades will no longer count in performance tables.
This - according to the laughably macho language beloved of the Telegraph - is part of a ‘crackdown’ on ‘schools who cheat the system’.
Which, as ever, would be more acceptable if we known that this was the brave new world into which we had been dragged. But we didn’t know. And we don’t yet know who it affects or what the implications are.
It’s that typical Sunday night feeling - policy announced via the papers.
Thus the ground-rules have - yet again - appeared to shift, based not on lobbying or consultation or evidence, but instead (we can only assume) on ministerial whim or sheer spite.
Note: I’m not denying the root-cause - the allegation of cheating. Because, with the greatest of regrets, I now have no doubt that cheating in English has happened and that we have all paid the price, especially those of us working in departments where our speaking & listening grades and our controlled assessments have been scrupulously fair.
But I also recognise why we find ourselves where we find ourselves. Some schools have flogged the system to its near-destruction. It’s a sign of the way accountability measures have driven school behaviour. It’s sad and rather sordid.
Thus we hear of schools where students gaining F and G for their reading and writing have miraculously been granted A and A* equivalents for their speaking and listening assessments.
This may be theoretically possible (there will be a few young people whose speaking is extraordinary and their writing, for specific reasons, very weak), but it’s pretty unlikely here in the real world of normal language capability.
We have also heard too many examples of controlled assessments being undertaken by students with heavy prompts, word banks and writing frames provided by their teachers. Their first drafts, we hear, are then - scandalously - marked and given back in order for students to rewrite them, thereby bumping their scores up considerably.
Most schools haven’t been doing this. Many have used early entry quite legitimately as a motivator for students seeking their college places. They haven’t been cheating at all.
But some schools, it seems, have. It may be the febrile world of inter-school competition and an accountability regime that means one school can only get better if another gets worse that leads to such stories.
It does feel, from where I’m sitting, as if English in particular is in a bad way.
And yet ...
Yesterday I took four Sixth Form students to a debating contest in London. I had of course put together one of my legendary CD mixes to keep them entertained en route. But instead, selfishly, they chose to talk. And as they talked, I listened.
These were students (boys, as it happened) studying a range of subjects, with three of them doing A-level English Literature.
In their conversations they talked of Samuel Beckett, of Richard Dawkins, of Miley Cyrus, of Alfred Lord Tennyson, of John Grisham. They reflected on slang, on internet protocols, on TV shows that I hadn’t heard of, on the physical experience of reading on a Kindle versus a book, and much else.
They talked, in other words, of the texts and cultural phenomena that shape our language - from the past and from the present.
Then they went on and debated against some of the top teams in the UK - the likes of Eton College, St Paul’s, Westminster School - and held their own as representatives of the only non-selective state school in the competition.
Their reading and their conversations had nourished them. They demonstrated what I think English should help all of our students to be able to do.
It reminded me of the centrality of English to the curriculum, and why we must rescue it from the life support unit.
Like other English teachers, I’m under pressure to join the stampede for early entry this November - that last-chance-saloon for speaking & listening to count in the overall aggregation of GCSE scores.
At our school, we are resisting. We think English should be about learning, not about a mad-cap scramble to get students ready for an early exam based on league table prowess.
We’re also under pressure to shift more students out of Literature and to give them a more utilitarian diet of reading comprehension and writing.
We are resisting. We think Literature is an integral part of learning English.
But we are building a lot more explicit language work in to Literature at the same time. We recognise that now the English exam will be worth 60% of grades (with speaking & listening removed), we need to give it much more emphasis - and not just in the final run-up through revision.
There is, however, one area where we are seriously changing our practice.
In the past the decision between higher and foundation tier was driven by the risk that a student entered for higher tier English ran the risk of gaining no grade if he failed to get a D.
This year’s results have shown us that he could in fact have been awarded an E.
Even more significantly, that higher tier entry would have given him a bigger chance amid those shifting sands of grade boundaries to secure a C.
So we expect to enter far more students for higher tier in future. We will do this if we think it will benefit them.
Never has the need for core values in English been more important. Heads of English have never been under more pressure to attend not only to the needs of their students, but to contribute to the overall performance of their school. For many the stress has been pretty intolerable.
We all have to do what’s right in our own context.
But we also have to look ourselves in the mirror each night.
My advice, for what it’s worth, is that we remember the often intangible influence English has beyond the mechanistic world of performance tables and resits, the way our subject shapes the thinking and language of our students.
And therefore we should do - as far as we can - precisely what’s right for our students, even if that may mean not jumping through the mandatory hoops of early entry, or marginalising literature, or allowing controlled assessment to warp our practice - all of which currently seem an essential part of enhancing school performance.
English always was about values. Nowadays, more than ever, it still is.
Best wishes for the term ahead.
Geoff Barton
29 September 2013
6:15pm
Sunday, 29 September 2013