Government guidance issued yesterday regarding changes to the English Literature examinations for GCSE sparked debate over what content to deliver to Year 11 in order to maximise their chances of success in the 2021 series of exams.

We were part way through teaching Macbeth when Covid-19 shut down our schools in March. I made the decision not to have my department continue teaching such a complex text remotely for two main reasons:

1. The difficulty of accessing it themselves could have overwhelmed many of our students, causing them to worry at a time when they had enough to worry about.

2. I did not want my students’ view of Shakespeare to be forever blighted by the horrors of clinical, lone learning via remote platforms - both Shakespeare and the students deserve better than that.

I decided to focus on the poetry anthology and my team and I went about creating screencasts, booklets and presentations accordingly.

So, you can imagine my dismay yesterday on hearing the announcement from Ofqual that, for 2021 only, GCSE students can choose to answer on three out of the usual four areas of content, with Shakespeare being the only non-negotiable.

The pros and cons of teaching four texts

My thoughts went immediately to the unfairness of some schools having already taught the Shakespeare text, therefore having more time next year to focus on English Language and only three topic areas.

I took some time to sit and reflect on the situation my team will be facing and felt I needed to do some strategic (yet positive!) thinking. I came up with a number of pros to teaching four topics.

Pro 1: Broad and balanced curriculum

The main positive is always going to be about the students having been provided with the opportunity to experience a range of literary forms. What is GCSE literature study, after all, without poetry by Simon Armitage?

Pro 2: Interest and engagement

If you, like me, usually teach all of the literature texts in Year 10, Year 11 can be a rather dry year with its focus on targeted exam practice, which can get dull, dull, dull.

Having a literature text in there could help keep things lively as well as serve the dual purpose of re-engaging pupils by getting their teeth into an interesting text.

Pro 3: Choice

Students can evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses and pick the texts they have connected with best. Personally, I would have loved the chance to boot Hardy (snore) off my exam paper.

Pro 4: Play to your centre’s strengths

You could review historical exam data alongside school assessment to get rid of the text that your centre’s pupils have been least successful with in the past. This will ensure that your students are not disadvantaged, while also maximising their chances at success: win-win.

However, with great pros, come great cons.

Con 1: Time

This was always going to be the humdinger and is obviously the reason Ofqual has decided to take such an unprecedented step to reduce some of its content. Is it possible to effectively teach an entire text (especially if it’s a behemoth such as Macbeth), and revision for the remainder of the units alongside the GCSE English language course?

Con 2: Stress

Will covering four texts, having essentially lost four teaching months in Year 10, cause undue anxiety in the students for something that is out of their control?

Con 3: No wriggle room

With this option, you will be teaching content right up to the wire. I have already mapped out the curriculum for Year 11 for next year and whileI’m finding that it will be doable, we will not have the luxury of completing both courses by February and having a nice long run of revision to the exams.

Coronavirus: post-lockdown challenges 

Whichever situation you find yourself in, it is undoubtedly going to be a challenging year. All of us will make choices based on our own contexts with the students’ best interests at heart. The news yesterday did cause a flutter of anxiety for me, however, sitting down to think through what the reality will be, both positively and negatively helped to put things in perspective.

My main aim for next year is to do the best for my students and allay as many of their worries as possible. There is little more I, or anyone else, can do.

Sana Master is an English teacher at a school in Yorkshire. She tweets @MsMaster13