It’s not all bad…
After reading the Ofsted report on English, I feel the need to put a few things down on ‘paper’. Writing is catharsis, after all. It’s not all negative: I like the focus the report places on teaching the components of writing and the need to place more emphasis on non-fiction texts. Yes, in some cases, the writing curriculum introduces complex tasks too soon, and yes, some pupils are asked to reproduce GCSE style writing in year 7. But, oh dear. I know that the report will generate much discussion, and I won’t cover everything here. So here are a few thoughts.
Irony
Once again, I’m struck by the breath-taking ignorance of a body that does not recognise how its own policies, alongside those of the DfE, contribute to the very concerns that it raises! Their comment that schools should “ensure that statutory tests and exams do not disproportionately influence decisions about curriculum and pedagogy” beggars belief in the lack of self-awareness it demonstrates. We could of course re-phrase this statement to say we should, as a sector and as a society, “ensure that statutory tests and exams do not disproportionately influence…” and insert any other phrase such as: the life chances of children; how we judge schools, teachers and students and so on.
Assessment objectives
On several occasions, the report’s authors seem to get confused about teaching to the exam and teaching GCSE assessment objectives. I agree, we should not be teaching to the exams, but GCSE assessment objectives are fairly generic and actually describe the sorts of things we want our children to learn: retrieval, inference, language analysis, comparison, etc. However, in this paragraph, it’s not clear whether the authors are able to make this distinction:
“In the schools that build their curriculum around GCSE assessment objectives and outcomes, pedagogy often focuses on getting pupils to practise answering exam-style questions from the start of Year 7. While it is important to know how to approach questions in an exam, pupils at these schools are given a narrow view of the subject. They are limited to completing PEE or point, evidence, terminology, analyse and link (PETAL) paragraphs or writing texts that are purely designed around exam tasks.”
Do the authors mean teaching to the mark scheme? Teaching to exam questions? In which case, yes, practising exam style questions in Year 7 is an absolute no-no: I’ve seen it happen and it crushes the life out of English. However, consider this GCSE assessment objective: “students must use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation’. Do the authors of the report not see this as a meaningful cornerstone of an English curriculum? After all, ‘spelling’ makes 23 appearances in its pages.
Spoken language
The document makes a lot of spoken language conventions, repeating the national curriculum statement that pupils should be taught to speak competently in a range of contexts”. There is nothing wrong with this and much of Voice 21’s work on oracy chimes with this: their philosophy, of learning to talk and learning through talk, added to which should be learning about talk, is a philosophy that should underpin any spoken language curriculum. However, it then adds this:
“Teachers often attribute pupils’ weaknesses in speaking to a lack of confidence rather than realising that they have not been taught what they need to know about the topic under discussion to be able to form and articulate worthwhile contributions.”
The implication here is that by giving pupils lots of knowledge, then they will naturally speak more effectively (a little like Michael Gove’s comment that children do not need to be taught how to speak – it is natural). So, more knowledge – better talkers? It’s not just knowing more about the topic: it is also knowing how to talk, how to use language to share ideas, to articulate thought into language and this can only be improved through practice, and through being taught the conventions of talk. With this comes confidence.
Elsewhere, the report gets bogged down with competence in the use of rhetoric and presentational forms of talk. At secondary school, the report states, spoken language should become more formalised – in other words as rehearsal for the spoken language endorsement. Yes, there is mention of using an appropriate register and tone to communicate, and there is mention of discussion and debate, but it feels as though the purpose of talk, for these authors, is to prepare formal presentations, to use rhetorical features, and to practice sentence structures in some sort of rote way to prepare for writing. The rain in Spain …
Indeed, whilst making a lot of ‘spoken language conventions’ it lands this blow towards the end:
“‘Oracy’, as distinct from a spoken language curriculum, is often seen as a way to support literacy. While such approaches might support the goals of the English curriculum, this is not necessarily the case. They are often general teaching approaches that do not consider spoken language as the object of study.”
This feels like a dismissal of oracy, and is undoubtedly a political one (given Keir Starmer’s flagging of its importance in July 2023). The report fails to see the importance of oracy in aspects of both pedagogy and curriculum planning and thus displaying an absolute ignorance of what oracy actually is. We all know that oracy is not distinct from a spoken language curriculum but in fact underpins it.
Drama
There is also no irony in the fifteen references to the importance of drama as a subject, and yet no admission that its relegation as an English discipline is almost entirely down to a narrowing of the GCSE English specifications and the lack of importance given to speaking and listening as a whole in the assessment of English at KS4. Or, of course, the fact that an outdated emphasis on an Ebacc curriculum ensures drama will be treated as a less-important subject in schools afraid of how their curriculum will be judged. Drama as pedagogy is given some mention, granted, and long may this be, (‘while there can be much to gain’ however, implies a big ‘however we’re not sure this is the best way to use it’). Its preferred use as the study of the drama qua drama, a higher art form (over film, for example), and a form where pupils can study dramatic techniques as an end to performance (improvise, rehearse, perform) sits nicely with the report’s views on spoken language and plays to its preferred audience.
Creativity
And what about creativity? Well, creative writing is mentioned once and is described as a ‘composite’ or outcome. A composite, as the document points out at the start, is a finished task (e.g., an essay or narrative) that is made up of components (sentences, paragraphs etc.). The authors thus neglect the role of creativity and creative thinking as a component in itself. Creativity is an organic process, one to be practised, honed, yes, but one that also emerges from engaging with ideas, with texts, and with others. The report mocks ‘some schools’ for designing adverts, stating that “[it] is unclear what pupils are able to learn or do as a result”. We don’t know: maybe the use of persuasive language, using facts to misdirect, the cropping of images to project a particular image of a place, or to create different connotations? But that would be ‘media studies’ and, heaven forbid we can’t have that. No mention of the power of the moving image in inspiring pupils to think visually, create story, analyse narrative, evaluate choices made by directors in adapting texts. Imagination, in fact, is mentioned once: by a year 6 pupil.
Writing as a creative form then is swerved, but, as I said at the outset, the comments on writing itself, as a ‘composite’, are worth considering. I’ve been working with some schools to think about how we can deconstruct writing forms, look at what writers do; teach students to generate ideas, to develop paragraphs, to build images and look beyond acronyms (see here). It’s not just about rhetoric: we need to give students the confidence to build ideas first then put the icing on the cake.
Finally
As always with Ofsted reports, their findings seem to damn us all: in the end, the authors draw on visits to 50 schools, 25 of them secondary. Think of the many thousands more they could have visited and how many different conclusions they could have drawn. Given the wonderful work that one sees across the internet, in blogs posted by teachers describing their teaching, their enthusiasm for creativity, their passion for literature (yes, even books about ‘social issues’, which, according to the authors of the report should play second fiddle to ‘complexity’, as if homelessness wasn’t a complex issue), I doubt that the English teaching world is in the kind of crisis suggested by this report.
Mr Hanson's English 