I, like most English teachers, will admit to having once harboured the romantic notion that the vocation would allow me to inspire creativity and spread my own joy and passion for the subject in a fashion akin to Mr Keating in Dead Poets Society.

I have shamelessly day-dreamed, at least once in the middle of a dazzling oration of Atticus’ closing speech, of jumping on the table to demonstrate the importance of “seeing” a different perspective.

Unfortunately, such grand ideals are quickly forgotten and our own passion mercilessly eroded; replaced instead by a repetitive diet of context, quotations and questions - exam-style, of course.

When did the subject we love become so joyless? 

English lessons in the majority of secondary schools have become all about GCSEs, regardless of whether the students are in Year 7 or Year 11. In the darkest recesses of the staffroom, secondary teachers can regularly be found criticising primary colleagues for teaching Sats-only skills and focusing entirely on the tests, before returning to their own classrooms to teach a sanitised diet of GCSE assessments to 12-year-olds. 

The hypocrisy is astounding and, yet, entirely commonplace and accepted.

This dilution of the curriculum has led to English becoming an exam-only subject. Some students will go through their entire secondary school experience looking at only GCSE texts with the occasional re-read of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas thrown in for good measure. This partly comes from restrictions on budgets regarding texts and resources, and partly from the pressure of exam success. 

Even the old adages of “we are doing this for Ofsted” or “Ofsted will want to see….” no longer hold water, with Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman having stated: “Preparing for GCSEs so early gives young people less time to study subjects in depth and more time just practising the tests themselves.”

Any conversation about redeveloping English curricula is usually met with the response: “But what about the data; will it fit the flight path?” Measuring and reporting data is, of course, a large part of modern teaching, but isn’t it also a large part of the problem? We spend so much time worrying about what they are scoring that we lose sight of what they are learning, and surely that is where our focus should lie.

This must change. How?

First, we need to challenge this stale status quo in order to reclaim the “wasted years”. The importance of key stage 3 upon a student’s development simply cannot be overstated. Since the abolition of Year 9 Sats, we have had the opportunity to interpret the curriculum in the best and most creative ways possible and teach the subject we fell in love with, as opposed to this new monster that should be renamed in planners as “Exam-English”.

Then we must expose students to texts and materials that they may never come across at any other time or in any other place during their lives. We need to teach a range of rich, diverse texts that will engage learners in the same way as we were engaged ourselves as youngsters.   

And finally, allowing students to experience a text or genre, enabling them to question what they have read safely and independently, is vital. Can’t we talk to students, ask them what they think a text means, without being consumed by PEAL, PETER or PETAL responses?  

This approach would begin to equip the students with the skills to succeed at GCSE and beyond without duplicating the tests they sit in Year 11. And who knows, maybe we would rediscover the joy of English while we were at it.

Dan Corns is an English teacher and author from Wolverhampton. He tweets at @DanWhoWrites