Since 1990 there have been three incarnations of a national curriculum for English in school. The version we currently have, Curriculum 2000 (in fact introduced in 1999), was seen as somewhat loose and woolly by the new Labour government, keen to stamp their mark on the English teaching fraternity. The vague level-descriptors were replaced by a literacy strategy, closely followed by a literary framework. These could be number-crunched to give measurable targets and this is what governs schools at the moment. We now have an extraordinary situation of teachers teaching something they thoroughly disapprove of, but have to teach because Ofsted comes calling.
Subsequently, there has been a subtle shift in the nature of knowledge in the English Curriculum. This is particularly prevalent in secondary schools. In primary schools English has become a discrete subject and is more literacy based. What has happened in the secondary sector is that any notion of English as an arts subject is evaporating. There was at one time a broad consensus that English was an arts subject: what was the basis of subject knowledge in English was the idea that somehow there was a relationship between language and art and life. There was a framing of life within the art of language. That was the goal English teachers aimed towards. English lessons were, in an odd sense, as much about life as they were about the books they were studying or the way you were encouraging children to write. This idea, that you were empowering children to escape, articulate, to gain space and language to think, was what English teaching was about. If you taught a book, you had discussion arising from it. One’s task as an English teacher was to regulate this learning by steering them through this process and give them a language of articulation.
What is happening now is that, because of the literacy framework, there are numerous “lists”. Children are expected to gain up to 300 competences by year nine. You cannot argue against the individual competences within the lists (all children should know how to use a semi-colon, for example), but the way in which it is itemised gives a completely different image of what knowledge actually looks like. What happens now, because Ofsted comes in and people are very keen on these learning objectives and learning outcomes, the basis of a lesson will be the acquisition of a piece of knowledge or a fact. The lesson is now a strict regimen beginning with “This is your learning objective” and ending with “What have you learnt?”. It is a very particular form of descriptive writing that is being pushed. This has created a shift whereby English is becoming like maths teaching. You are acquiring vast bodies of knowledge which do not necessarily improve children’s quality of writing. Instead of reading a horror story in the dark with a torch, you now learn the generic features of the horror story. The children are taught to remember the formula of a horror story, without the sense that the point of a horror story is to alarm and frighten people. They don’t realise that if it does not do this it has failed, even if you have covered all the generic features.
We have changed the nature of knowledge and if this is what the English curriculum is about, we need to unite as a profession. There should not be a split between universities and schools where the DFES writes the curriculum. We should say collectively that this is not what we are about and provide a unified voice against this: in schools we are being drowned.
Newsletter Issue 6 - February 2004
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