GCSE English is dying, this is how we bring it back to life

Pearson, one of the three leading exam boards in the UK, has warned that urgent reform at GSCE level is needed. If English (as a subject) is to survive at both A-Level and higher education, it needs to be less pale, male and stale.

- ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

Sharon Hague, managing director of the examining body, said that worrying figures reveal only 7 per cent of students answer questions on a text written by a woman. Literature also remains disproportionately focused on works by white male authors, with fewer than 1 per cent of GCSE candidates studying texts by nonwhite authors. So, what are we doing wrong?

I understand the struggle to engage students – and to keep them interested. I have spent the best part of the last 15 years working in schools, universities, prisons and referral units with pupils who would otherwise be considered disruptive, neurodivergent or underachieving.

My aim in those spaces is to try to encourage them to see poetry and literature as something greater than a daunting analytical exercise, or a puzzle that needs solving; and rather to see it as an essential part of human expression and connectivity. I’ve seen first hand how exposing students to texts that they see their lives reflected in totally transforms their relationship to literature. It’s a welcome sign. A way of saying: your life and the place you come from matters, too.

But it is tough going to make these texts accessible. If I were to take in texts by, say, any of the Romantic poets, then I know many of the pupils would struggle with the language and phrasing of Keats or Byron. If I took in work which centred on mid-20th century American history or the antebellum South then, again, I’d run the risk of losing the group.