It’s been a fascinating week. Last Friday, our school ran a networking morning when returning students, two years into their degree courses, shared their university experiences – good and bad – with our current Year 12. They were bright, optimistic and clearly loving what they were doing. One told me that returning to Macbeth (which I taught her class a few years before) had helped to secure a high grade for her history paper. 

Obviously, it was the new contextual understanding and her more sophisticated skills that had revived and reorientated her A-level material, but it was wonderful that the substance of the key stage 5 course had remained with her.

Last Saturday, at the annual conference of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE), visiting Australian academics shared their research into the motivation of English teachers. Top of the list of factors influencing the decision to be an English teacher was a "love of literature", third was a "love of English as a subject", and fifth was a "love of a wide range of texts'. Sandwiched between these was "making a difference to young people's lives". Nothing hugely surprising there, then. 

This portrays a strong message about the centrality of subjects themselves: a message for the bureaucrats making the rules about final qualifications and teaching standards, a message for those at the very top of multi-academy trusts and other bodies setting teaching and learning objectives.

'Suffocating' assessment objectives

It would be defying the rules of politeness to couch a message about subjects in the same terms as the slogan from 1990 “It’s the economy, stupid!”, but, having seen assessment objectives strangling the living daylights out of all our subjects, my plea would be to, please, let our subjects breathe.

In his Tes column this week, Kevin Stannard quite rightly asserts that, “We can’t let exams smother great teaching." As a head of department over the past 20 years, I have been only too aware of the suffocating effect on all our disciplines of assessment objectives.

In 1999, ahead of Curriculum 2000, I attended the first meeting at which assessment objectives raised their ugly heads. The consequence since then of foregrounding criteria has been for teachers to structure more mechanistic lessons and students to produce some very awkward long essay answers as they try to accommodate the demands of the regulator over the approach the subject might naturally assume.

And today, English literature beyond GCSE has become an early casualty of the latest round of specification change and attendant mechanistic thinking as student numbers drop off at A level. The central emotionally and intellectually sustaining aspects of our subjects have to shout louder than the no doubt well-intentioned but misguided rule-making of those at the top.

So it’s wonderful to get feedback from our headteacher about Year 8 loving Animal Farm, for example, or from a parent about My Antonia going down well with their child at key stage 4, though it’s devastating when a text doesn’t engage students so well. It’s the same in other subjects: the Tudors are always popular, human geographical issues feed into a study of The Village by the Sea, and ethics in RS always add fuel to the fire of debate.

How, then, do we defend our subjects from the “sackcloth and ashes” approach to the curriculum, from the over-bureaucratic and the excessively regulated? To protect subjects, Dr Stannard sees teachers as the buffers, doing their best to keep excessive examination focus at bay.  He acknowledges the very limited scope the accountability framework offers them to do what needs to be done at a more influential level.

But his suggestion for leaders of “calibrating performance appraisals and setting the agenda for learning walks and lesson observations, and promoting team teaching and principles of shared accountability” doesn’t take away the excesses that are so disengaging for teachers. He is simply exercising managerial processes and maintaining an over-zealous accountability structure – just with a different focus.

'The buccaneers of teaching'

I see heads of department as the buccaneers of the profession, prepared to finesse the greatest subject-related enjoyment out of the educational experience. This subversive, potentially risky role involves a more subject and teacher-centred approach. First and foremost, the head of department role should be about playing to the strengths of our teachers: sharing and evaluating practice; making suggestions and engaging in joint problem-solving when encountering difficulties. Facing together the inevitable difficulties and setbacks when starting out on new texts should mean negotiating freedoms in an open, no-blame culture.

It’s about securing as far as possible the best preparation for new developments, taking the best of what is going on elsewhere and shaping it to fit the school, the teaching, the students and the context. And, most importantly, growing our own expertise.

In the face of increasing graduate hardship and reported mental health issues for some, we cannot overlook the central importance of what they study in the wellbeing of students everywhere.

In KS4 and 5, exam results are the most important thing in the world to the cohort taking them and receiving results – understandably so when the next step depends so heavily, though not exclusively, on them. But long-term education, long-term student and teacher wellbeing, even the survival of the disciplines themselves, are best served by letting our subjects breathe.

Yvonne Williams is a head of English and drama in the South of England