Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda makes a plea for greater opportunities for ‘low-stakes’ writing opportunities at KS4.
As a writing teacher, NWP member, and former head of English, I'm concerned about the decline in the amount, status, and scope of writing opportunities for KS4 students that I've witnessed over more than twenty five years in the profession; a devaluation that I think has been exacerbated in recent years by the removal of coursework and the 2015 English curriculum changes .
Teachers in my own school (and colleagues I know about elsewhere) deliver the GCSE Literature and Language curriculum simultaneously. The literature includes Shakespeare, poetry, modern prose or drama and a pre-1900 novel. As a result, far more than 50% of teaching time is taken up with ‘delivering’ these texts, simply because of the cognitive demands they make on students.
Moreover, since the exam-required response to these texts is formal criticism, there are increasingly limited reasons for teachers to playful, creative responses to those texts as we once did routinely when there was a coursework element.
English Language should be split 50% reading and 50% writing. However, the demands of the different kinds of reading questions, and the complexity of the associated assessment, mean that a significantly greater amount of lesson time is dedicated to reading than writing.
Anecdotally, only about 10% of classroom time is spent on narrative, exploratory or personal writing, when in fact, it commands half the language marks, and 25% of the overall marks across the two GCSEs.
For the OCR GCSE Language papers, for example, students complete two writing questions; one is likely to be a story or non-fiction writing rooted in autobiography; the other is likely to be more 'transactional' writing to argue/persuade: a letter, blogpost, magazine article. Perhaps this latter kind of writing is perceived by teachers to be somehow easier to 'teach'; at least some aspects are attainable in more formulaic ways. I don’t know, but it does seem as if more lesson time is devoted to it, and it is often taught through tick-box techniques. Story and personal writing are perceived as unimportant, and must happen by osmosis, or magic.
Thus, simply in terms of the amount of time that students spend on writing, it has become, in the years since 2015, the poor relation of reading and literature.
The problem is not confined to GCSE and KS4, since, as Gabrielle Cliff-Hodges argues so eloquently, because KS3 is seen simply as a 'waiting room' for GCSE examinations (2017), lessons in Year 7-9 follow a similar pattern of practice.
Given the issues outlined above, by the time they reach Year11, many students not only have low confidence in their writing ability, but also see free and creative writing as unimportant. If it isn't prioritised in classrooms, then why would they view it any other way?
Yet personal writing is often a route to understanding, reflection and self-awareness, regardless of its percentage significance in examination terms. When last year's Year 11 class lost one of their number in tragic circumstances, I gave over longer than usual lesson time for free-writing, with no prompt. Weeks later, students explained how thankful they were for the time to begin to process in writing what had happened. One told how his emotions were complicated by not knowing this person well but watching others grieve. He claimed that he ‘didn't know how he was supposed to feel’ until he tried ‘talking privately to the page.’
Perhaps, as those senior secondary students navigate the pressures of that examination year in an emotionally-fragile post-pandemic world, opportunities to write in this way should be a bigger priority than ever.
References: Cliff Hodges, G. (2017). ‘The Value of Studying Young Adult Literature at Key Stage 3: Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin.’ The English Association Journal for Teachers of English Vol. 68, No3, Summer 2017.