Children’s literature is a genre where imagination and creativity are limitless. Through the eyes of the characters, you can walk through a wardrobe into a frozen world, have a conversation with part of your very own soul and experience thrilling battles with pirates in the pursuit of treasure. 

What is puzzling, then, is that there is an increased tendency to overlook the raft of high-quality children’s texts available in pursuit of more “challenging” class readers at key stage 3.

Although choosing a text that cognitively pushes students is important, we must be mindful that challenge should not be confused with difficulty.

In some schools, texts such as Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Miller’s The Crucible, both of which were previously taught at key stage 4, have replaced books written by children’s literary giants such as Morpurgo, Dahl and Pullman. 

The benefits of children’s literature

The characters in children’s literature - think Lyra Belacqua and Stanley Yelnats IV - are often lovable, memorable and, most importantly, when engaging reluctant readers, relatable. And this is not simply because they are also young. It’s because they experience some of the same challenges that all teenagers face: unrequited first love, friendship issues and familial conflict.

As a teacher, I’ve often suspected that the eager cries of “Are we reading today, Miss?” when teaching a class novel have been a result of these texts enabling some students to make sense of their sometimes confused teenage existence.

Whilst I’m not advocating swapping all texts taught at KS3 for books, plays and poems that have been specifically written for children (if I am then it’s bye bye Shakespeare!), we should be mindful that an overload of novels that are linguistically too difficult for most adults will likely turn many students away from literature by making them think it’s just not for them.

It will also inhibit students from being able to fully comprehend the texts we teach, limiting many to just grasping the plot and not complexities such as the presentation of themes, authorial intent and the relationship between the context and the story. 

KS3 English: creating a love of reading

It’s absolutely within the pedagogical power of teachers to make texts with unfamiliar or complex language and syntax accessible. However, it also makes the level of teacher intervention high, which takes time away from development of reading strategies, such as predicting, questioning and making inferences. By ensuring that we carefully choose texts at KS3 that are still conceptually challenging but also brilliantly engaging for a younger readership, we free up time and mind space for students to practise these skills.

It’s also worth remembering that while there is enormous freedom within children’s books in terms of content, boundaries are almost always observed by their writers. We rightly shield our youth from some of the horrors of our world within this genre or, at least, in the case of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, use it to teach the next generation lessons that must never be forgotten.

KS3 should be a time when, rather than choosing books based solely on the fact that it will prepare them for an exam that they will take in five, four, three years’ time, we concentrate on helping students to fall in love with a genre that has been created especially for them.

The writer is an English teacher in Essex