The national curriculum has laid down rules and regulations in educational policy that can be extraordinary restrictive in our teaching resources and student achievement. Have we lost the creative element in teaching English that is its very soul. Alan Robertshaw, retired Headteacher and author recalls the approach of a generation ago.
More than 40 years ago I found myself the most junior member of an extremely distinguished team of English teachers who, as was their usual habit, were having a party in late August prior to the start of term. They were all older than me, and terribly impressive. Most of them went on to become principals of various schools and colleges and all of them were experienced: which I, an untrained recent graduate, was not. I recall drawing one of the less intimidating about-to-be-colleagues aside and asking, diffidently, how he thought I might go about preparing for my first lessons. It was a subject causing me some anxiety.
“My dear boy,” he said, affably and perhaps a little inebriated, “how can you possibly prepare lessons until you’ve met the students? You need to get to know them first!”
So I went into my first week’s teaching wholly unprepared.
This is not, of course, recommended procedure; and – and this is the point of the anecdote – would be completely impossible now. Even if one were to arrive completely without training in a classroom, one would still have the huge and detailed edifice of the National Curriculum to answer to – and any English Department nowadays would have a comprehensive syllabus for all years, detailing activities and learning objectives. Teachers, of course, still have to prepare lessons – but no longer is English teaching the personal fiefdom of individual teachers.
Even when, in the 1970’s, I became a Head of English, we had no written syllabus. We had a huge and eclectic resource of stimuli – almost entirely literary and ranging from whole novels to short extracts and poems – which members of my department were encouraged to use as they thought fit. The objectives, such as they were, were entirely to do with enriching personal experience and developing sensitive use of language.
Teachers owned the curriculum in those days. The classroom was the forum for a creative relationship with growing minds, an enabling location for the development of enquiring, sensitive, articulate young people.
Much of this liberalism was in response to the English teaching of the post-war years, when the subject consisted only of reading a restricted range of Great Authors, answering detailed questions to demonstrate comprehension, learning to précis prose, and – most important of all – mastering the arcane art of parsing*.
Now a question presents itself. Was this liberal, responsive strategy wholly bad? It certainly failed to ensure that anyone left school with any identifiable skill-set – and that was a signal omission. But when Society reclaimed the curriculum from the teachers, and instructed us what to teach, and when, and how, did we lose anything. It’s a question I have often debated, and I do not know the answer.
A couple of years ago a former pupil of mine, from those days half a century (almost) ago, casually meeting a former colleague, told him that “beyond all other teachers” I had been, thanks to my English lessons, “A life-long inspiration.” The anecdote is humbling, of course: I don’t even remember him. But I wonder, sometimes, whether the controlled contemporary curriculum, with its assessment objectives and levels of attainment, would have left room for such a memory.
I don’t know the answer.
*(Analyising sentences into their component parts in order to demonstrate a grasp of formal grammar)
Alan Robertshaw
Bio:
Alan was born in Wallasey, on Merseyside, just before the end of WWII, and spent his school days there attending an old school-board primary school (classes of 50 were standard) and a tiny, rather second rate grammar school.
He had the enormous good fortune to go to York University as part of its very first intake, where he read English with Education and was taught by some of the best, the great and the good. He graduated with a 1st in 1966 and then spent two years trying to stay a student forever, by preparing his M.Phil. thesis. Finally, facing unemployment in 1968, he went against all better judgement and accepted an invitation from the Manchester Grammar School to teach English. Thence, in 1971, into the real world of a Sheffield Comprehensive; in 1974 to become Head of English in Garforth; in 1982 to become Deputy of a small, progressive Comprehensive in North Notts; and finally, in 1991, to the headship of a Barnsley Comprehensive where he spent ten marvellous, exhausting years before retirement. With the exception of his baptism of fire in Sheffield, he enjoyed every day of his working life.
Alan’s novel, “The Edge of Things” was published in 2009 and is available from Amazon.
