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Draft Response of the London Association
for the Teaching of English to the QCA English 21 Consultation
LATE welcomes
the opportunity to discuss the future of English and hopes that
our views (and those of other English teachers across the country)
will be listened to and acted upon by QCA and by Government ministers.
Our first point
must be that the four strands identified by QCA (English for All
learners, Ways ahead in Assessment, 14 – 19 Flexibility and
Innovation, E-English – Texts and Technologies) cannot be
effectively considered in isolation from each other. The current
high-stakes testing regime, for example, defines and determines
what is taught. Until this regime changes or is significantly modified
it is futile to discuss curriculum separately from assessment. Assessment
should serve the curriculum, rather than vice versa.
Secondly, we
do not believe that it is helpful to consider English as a set of
discrete skills, either now or in ten years’ time. Such a
view, especially as suggested by the “functional literacy”
model, will fail to deliver higher standards of literacy because
it does not take into account the social and cultural context of
learners and teachers: their personal and social histories, interests,
needs, relationships and ambitions. We should instead be aiming
to foster confident, articulate, active, flexible, reflective, critical
and truly independent learners. A consideration of what English
should be like in 2015 should be less a matter of guessing which
skills will be desired at that point in history than a matter of
enabling young people to adapt their understanding and production
of spoken, written and multimodal texts in relation to new social
and political realities and in relation to new technologies.
It is in this
context that we would endorse the statement from the Institute of
Education English Group and wish to submit the following four statements
in response to the QCA English 21 consultation.
English
for all Learners
We need a fully
social model of learning, an aspect of English that seems absent
from the questions posed by QCA under the heading “English
for all learners.” We would draw attention to the central
importance of Peter Medway’s description of English classrooms
as places which “create and sustain social relations of trust,
creativity, dialogue and shared memory”(Changing English,
12.1, 2005, pp. 26-28). We fully endorse the principles outlined
in Every Child Matters: that all learners, including the disaffected,
the excluded and the vulnerable, are entitled to a rich, intellectually
challenging experience of English within the mainstream classroom.
Within a social
model, all.students need to be given opportunities to draw on the
full range of their cultural resources and experiences. It follows
that they should be encouraged to make use of their home/community
languages within English lessons. We endorse the key principles
and statement of entitlements in the contribution to English 21
entitled “Valuing diversity in the English curriculum.”
Skills are,
of course, important; but to focus on skills without paying attention
to the informing social context and content of learning is to take
a reductive view of English – and of learners. A full account
of English for all learners is one that pays attention to the seriousness
with which students and teachers alike address both the content
and the social relationships of English lessons. Implicated in this
account is a commitment to the long perspective – to a recognition
that development takes place over time, at different rates for different
learners and in ways that are seldom strictly linear. The implications
of this on all matters of planning and assessment are of paramount
importance and we draw deplore the limiting effects of examinations
that deny creativity to any and all learners.
There will always
be debate around the idea of a canon, of literary heritages and
values. But these debates cannot substitute for the decisions taken
by teachers and students about the ways in which texts will be read,
the uses to which they will be put, the meanings that will be made
and contested. There is an inevitable complexity about issues surrounding
the choice of texts to be used within English lessons. The criteria
for selecting texts include:
• what students bring to the texts;
• the potential texts offer students to make meaning and to
create new texts
• what the teacher wants them to learn.
Whatever text is chosen, we stress the importance of encouraging
students to work with a sense of the whole text: where the focus
is on particular moments within a longer text, students still need
an awareness of the whole if they are to make adequate sense of
the extract.
Assessment
LATE believes
that current assessment arrangements are distorting the curriculum
at all Key Stages, and that the political uses of results from ‘high
stakes’ tests, in the form of school league tables, mean that
the assessment tail is wagging the curriculum dog. Since current
assessments at all levels – but most notably at the ends of
Key Stages 2 and 3 – are limited to testing a small range
of students’ abilities in English there is the danger of a
proportionate narrowing of the English curriculum. The more explicit
and prescribed the assessment objectives at any given point - and
the greater the status placed on the ability to respond to these
objectives – the more this leads to the temptation to teach
to the tests, rather than providing a broad and balanced curriculum.
In terms of
the current modes of assessment, LATE would question the skills
hierarchy that proposes to evaluate progress in reading, writing
and speaking and listening. In writing, for example, there appears
to be an over-emphasis on the ability to reproduce genre features
and employ certain stylistic devices; in reading there is a seemingly
rigid notion of progress from the literal to the inferential. Where
in these models is it possible to assess, for example, how much
students have enjoyed reading a particular text or how far their
writing and talk have enabled them to communicate personal understandings?
LATE believes
that the responsibility for assessing students should reside with
those people who know them best, their classroom teachers. English
teachers across all phases develop a guild knowledge of what constitutes
quality in students’ production of texts: judgements made
on pieces of work using this knowledge are more reliable than reference
to detailed markschemes. Reestablishing the status of teacher assessment,
and supporting teachers so that they can develop their expertise
through shared marking and moderation, should be a primary aim of
a future system.
Reasserting
the primacy of teacher assessment would free teachers to provide
a curriculum that engages, stimulates and challenges students in
their care. It is self-evident that a student’s engagement
in a task will affect their performance; with teachers as lead assessors
of their students, tasks can be negotiated and adequately differentiated
to enable students to show what they can do, rather than identify
their failings. Ongoing teacher assessment of student work can be
genuinely formative, whilst also providing reliable and rigorous
summative judgements. Such approaches are in harmony with the current
‘Assessment for Learning’ agenda, and ensure that students
themselves are involved in the process of assessment and subsequent
target setting.
English 14-19
There is a clear
need for a major review of how English looks between the ages of
14-19, and the opportunities it can offer to satisfy the needs and
interests of the whole cohort of students across those years. To
this end, LATE feels in the first instance that the Tomlinson report
was far too quickly dismissed by the government and that this contribution
to the debate should be revisited and thoroughly discussed. Even
if in itself it doesn’t contain solutions, the report identifies
the key areas that need reform by 2015, and proposes some possible
ways forward which deserve much fuller consideration than they have
thus far had. Thus, we welcome recent comments by Ruth Kelly which
have put the idea of a ‘diploma’ back on the agenda.
Echoing Tomlinson,
and voicing a long held position, LATE feels it is vital to break
down the academic/vocational divide. Insisting on preserving GCSE
and A level more or less as they are now will only maintain, or
even increase, that divide. A ‘core and options’ model
might be a way forward, with all students offered comparable experiences
at 14-16, while at 16-19 the system should provide opportunities
to move freely across the academic and vocational divide. A ‘core
and options’ model should, too, allow for a reworking of the
relationship between English literature and other ‘Englishes’.
Such a model might offer GCSE and A Level type qualifications comprising
of common elements preserving an entitlement to English Language
and Literature, while giving students opportunities to pursue interests
in media, drama, linguistics or creative writing as comparable options.
NATE’s recent publication Text: Message has a fuller debate
around these issues, particularly with reference to the current
dominant status of literature in the post-16 phase.
The current
testing regime is distorting the curriculum at all Key Stages, and
cosmetic reductions in the number of A level units is not the answer
at 14-19. More flexible and varied modes of assessment are needed,
with more recognition of the value to learners of sampling the ‘work
of the course’. More flexible assessment should foster, and
develop in parallel with, greater flexibility in course content
and structures, and may go some way to combating the current problem
in A Level literature, for example, where it is currently easy to
see the course simply as a set of prescribed texts. English courses
– across literature and language – need to be underpinned
by a framework for study which establishes necessary skills and
concepts and allows teachers to choose texts which both address
these and interest their students.
In addition
to these thoughts, LATE would support views expressed in Barbara
Bleiman’s paper for QCA concerning the communications strand
of Tomlinson’s 14-19 report, arguing for a broad definition
of the concept of functional literacy.
E-English
The growth in
the use of technologies has implications for the future as we will
be dealing with students whose relationships with text will be different.
Schools will have to plan for, provide and support technologies,
for example in the use of ICT technicians. Schools will also have
to ensure equal access to technology and to review how technologies
support learning as well as how work using technologies is to be
assessed.
It seems inevitable that
new technologies will change the teaching and learning dialogue.
Classroom teachers should be involved in the development of school
uses of new technologies. They will need to be given time to plan
for and reflect on changes to classroom organisation and pedagogy.
Technologies should be
used in context, supporting students carrying out meaningful tasks
rather than jumping through skills hoops. Technologies should be
used to enable students to learn, and to learn with greater independence,
and teachers should be encouraged to use new technologies to encourage
the sharing of knowledge, active discussion and collaboration between
learners.
The use of technologies
in English should be seen as a means to an end rather than being
an end in itself.
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