Over the past few years, I have watched with interest as each subject report from Ofsted has landed.
In them, we have learned that some subjects were afforded little curriculum time. We heard that, often, coverage was the goal, with some curricula being a “mile wide”, but “an inch thick”.
This has raised questions. How on earth are primary schools supposed to fit it all in? In subjects like history and science, how can teachers do anything more than scratch the surface of the overstuffed curriculum they will face at key stage 3?
It is therefore not without some trepidation that I broach the subject of English. It looms large in every timetable and is, after all, how students gain access to the rest of the curriculum as well as being an object of study itself.
We know that there are still pupils who leave KS4 not meeting the expected standard in the subject, and progress in English is often the key to their next steps in education and employment. Why would we not give it more time? In fact, why don’t we give it more?
I’m going to urge caution, though. I can remember arriving at school on the first day of September a few years ago and being handed a timetable that looked quite different from the one I had expected. At some point over the summer, it was decided that instead of eight hours a fortnight of English in Year 9, the children should have 10.
I never really got to the bottom of why this had emerged so late in the game, but here we were, with our beautifully designed curriculum and two extra hours a fortnight to do with what we will. Some would argue this was an enviable position to be in. We, the teachers, did not feel that way.
We had an urgent choice to make: go back to the start with our schemes or pad out the curriculum we already had. I am sad to say that, with the understandable constraints on day one of a new academic year, we opted for the latter.
Lessons were filled with personal reading sessions (sometimes quite arbitrarily in the library), adding in extra extended writing (often under exam conditions), or grabbing another video to enrich pupils’ understanding of the background of Animal Farm.
Of course, the students didn’t suddenly become better readers or writers. Just having more of something does not mean it is going to be high quality or that issues are going to be addressed.
Creating a sensible curriculum
Perhaps controversially, I think English is sometimes given too much time in the curriculum. Pupils need knowledge of science and history and geography, and all the richness of other subjects, to enhance their comprehension of the texts we put before them. They need opportunities to practise speaking, writing and reading in a range of contexts that go beyond the English classroom door.
Quickly, we found ourselves in a place where students in my Year 9 class were not getting the breadth they needed, or the precision. Students who were still struggling with the basics were in lessons where they were expected to write extended pieces or read texts independently that were beyond their reach.
Pupils who needed intervention with reading were given this a few times a week and then popped into a library lesson or independent reading session in the hope that just being in the proximity of books or other people reading might mean they would become better readers. Even the ones who loved reading ended up spending time staring at a page and never really making much progress.
We should think carefully about how we use our students’ time, both within English and across the timetable. We need to be clear what it is that we want them thinking hard about and doing. Students who find it difficult to write a non-fiction text, for example, will continue in that vein unless we give them the mechanics to write with, the content to explore, the models to break down with them and the appropriate language to write with.
If time in school is of the essence, let’s check how we are using it. Let’s make sure the choices we make are not time fillers but instead are giving our students what they need.
Zoe Enser is the school improvement lead for a trust in the North West of England
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