Ofqual, the exams authority, has announced that next year schools won’t have to do all the components of English literature GCSE. Students must answer on Shakespeare, but can choose two out of three from the 19th-century novel, a modern drama or novel, and poetry, as represented by a themed anthology. So, for the first time since the inception of GCSE and indeed any other exam in the short history of English literature, poetry is an option.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s only for a year. Plenty of teachers will stick with the poems, especially if they’ve already studied them. It doesn’t speak well of the status of English, though. The content of double science – the popular three-in-one science GCSE – is presumably also, as Ofqual says of poetry, difficult to deliver online, but Ofqual isn’t telling teachers they can pick between chemistry and biology next year providing they stick with the physics. It would cause outrage: we all know that all three sciences are important. So what do we know about poetry? Cutting just English and the speaking elements of modern foreign language sends a wider message about the importance of these subjects, a message about who can be bossed and what is dispensable.
Too many such messages have already been sent – about MFL, about English and about poetry. Since the Gove reforms, in 2013, English has been shrunk, confined and battered into rote learning and stock responses. Teachers have to fight the curriculum to keep English as a discipline, as the open, expressive subject that was once so popular in schools. As a result, uptake of English literature A-level is in retreat for the first time in its history. Some sixth forms don’t even offer it anymore.
Besides, the announcement is out of tune with the times. We are aware of an urgent need to diversify the curriculum: poetry, with its wealth of diverse, rich, yet accessible full texts is the best and quickest way to do that. It is no longer true that teenagers are resistant to poetry. On the contrary, more young people are engaging regularly with poetry than ever before: reading it, creating it, sharing it with each other, often on social media. A survey by the Children’s Literacy Trust in 2018 put it at 48%, especially, not except, among economically deprived children. Poems are spoken on TikTok and shared on Instagram. The Black Lives Matter movement has poets as central figures. Over the pandemic, poetry has been shared more than ever before.
When the teenagers flow back to school in September, many of them will have poems on the phones in their pockets. Many teachers will long to embrace the moment, to encourage the writing and sharing of poetry about what has happened to us, and to draw those new poems into the conversation about the poetry of the past. Poetry needs to be central, not an option.
