Is A Level English in decline? Perhaps - but not for reasons that you think, says Griselda Heppel
The
A level results are in and it appears there has been an overall 13% decline in the number of students choosing to study English Language and Literature. The
reason? According to several prominent writers and teachers, it’s all down to Michael
Gove. His recently reformed English GCSEs have taken all the joy
out of the subject, thereby deterring young people from continuing it in
the Sixth Form.
That is quite a claim. It ignores other factors at
play, most importantly the government’s push for more students to study STEM (Science,
Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects; any promotion of one subject has
to be at the expense of another. That is the price we pay in the UK for not
following the Baccalaureate model. Still, the message is that English GCSEs
aren’t as fun as they used to be. As an assistant headteacher put it, in the Guardian article referred to above: ‘GCSE
English language is sucking the joy out of the study of how we communicate: the
power and beauty in words.’
Now, my memory of English Language O level (antediluvian
that I am) is that power and beauty played no part in it at all, except in the
creative writing question (which also exists in today’s GCSE, so no change
there). The rest of the exam was made up of a multiple-choice Comprehension and
a tedious, difficult passage to Precis. Not a lot of fun. But presumably the
point of an English Language qualification is to test a student’s ability to understand and use language in different ways; looking at the 2 papers (Explorations in Creative Reading and
Writing and Writers’ Viewpoints and Perspectives) that make up the current GCSE, I’d say they do just that,
demonstrating the power and sometimes the beauty of words far better than in my
day.
Perhaps it’s GCSE English Literature that’s the
problem? If so, I have news for the Gove critics: the rot set in a good 20
years ago, when cramming the syllabus with misery literature became all the
rage. The message was clear: reading books will make you unhappy. Forced to study Death
of a Salesman aged 12 and again later at GCSE, together with Heart of
Darkness, Frankenstein and Things Fall Apart, my youngest son had no desire to continue with English at A level. (He was at
least spared The Mayor of Casterbridge and Of Mice and Men which
his sisters endured.)
Yes of course these are all great works – but how can an
unrelenting diet of bleakness, failure, humiliation, cruelty, loss, loneliness and despair encourage
anyone to feel that reading is fun? Throwing in the odd classic that has happy, lighter moments as well as sad ones – Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, Pride and
Prejudice – would that have hurt so much? I can’t trace the pre 2017 list
of texts now but am delighted to see all these given as options in the new
GCSE, as well as the other books above.
But there’s more to it than that. According to writer and poet Professor Michael Rosen the new exam is more “mechanical” and less creative: 'The student’s own response is not seen as relevant.' Again, I’ve
looked at the papers and seen no evidence of this but that doesn’t mean to say
it isn’t there, because this is a question of ‘tick-box’ marking, where
examiners expect certain points to be made and no others.
And that problem, too, goes back at least a couple of
decades, perhaps to the birth of GCSEs themselves in the 1980s. Given a poem to comment on for homework, my sons as teenagers reacted in the same way: ‘What’s the point, Mum? Everything
they want you to write is boring and obvious and if you think of something different to say, you lose marks.’
Which is why Professor Rosen and others seem to me
to be going for the wrong target. If we really want English literature to fire
young people’s imaginations – at GCSE and A Level – it’s not the new exams that
need to be tackled, but the inflexible marking scheme.
Then the power and beauty of words might at last have
a chance to speak.
Comments
I actually won the 6th form English prize at school, an event I remember not for any value I attach to it but because of the way our English teacher announced it to the class – as if it were the most surprising and unjust decision in all his several million years in the profession.
But I've also taught French at school and university and I have no doubt at all that the French approach to literature, which they call ‘Explication de texte’, is a far more sophisticated and useful discipline. I’m sure I’ve bleated on about this in a blog at some point, but ‘explication’ is not the same as ‘explanation’. In fact, a poet friend and colleague of mine, sadly no longer with us, used to say of the approach of some of our colleagues in the English department that, rather than analyse poems, they marked them.
https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/b/post-preview?token=APq4FmDRppxzTqd3Pn5C6WbKplOkMWSjqd3MIfZB0O-Rx-zSzvJt0TzpubgfF1oVX3YSiUavvvjm_I6Fl6VPzFb22I1N1cqftiFBDz37Q_UH1-CtiF_GFZ4_l9wGR_0nvqKXKY9lHYme&postId=6681904957592834159&type=POST
I’ve tried it and it does work but may need some fiddling. If you can’t access it, let me know and I’ll send you a Word copy of it.