Is A Level English Dying?

Here Are the Facts

Students can take 3 different English A levels, including literature. The total number of English A level entries in 2022 was 53,323, compared to 75,000 in 2017. But the decline is actually worse than this, because there are many more 18 year olds in 2022 than there were in 2017. It hasn’t recovered in 2023 or 2024.

English literature has suffered more than a 25% decline since 2017. In 2022, English literature became the 12th most popular subject at A level – it has never before been outside the top 10. In fact, in 2013, English was ranked number 1, and ranked 2 in 2014. That’s less than a decade to destroy the subject.

We may cling desperately to the hope that this is not our fault, that this is a symptom of society moving towards STEM subjects, with greater employability down the line. Well, STEM subjects have risen by 3.5% since 2019, while humanities fell by 3.3%. Problem identified?

Sadly, no. Not even close.

Sociology, a subject with scraping the bottom of the barrel career prospects, has moved from 10th most popular in 2017, to 5th most popular in 2022. Psychology (where graduates attract some of the lowest salaries) was the second most popular A level subject in 2020 and 2021, and it was the number one choice for female students. Since 2017 psychology entries have risen by 18,858. In the same period, literature entries have fallen by 19,814.

Does this look remotely like a STEM issue? No.

Whatever is happening to literature entries is being driven entirely by what is happening in English in schools.

What’s Killing English?

The terminal decline accelerated in 2017. This coincided exactly with the new GCSE, which students began studying in 2015. Let’s count just some of the ways that this appalling exam has been hammering nails into an English shaped coffin.

1. The language paper used to take 2 hours and 15 minutes. The current paper is nearly identical, but students are given only 1:45 minutes. This is not a raising of standards, it is more of a test of handwriting speed. The focus is less on subject knowledge and skill and more on stamina and resilience.

2. Many of the questions are arbitrary. Instead of writing a precis, a lifelong skill, students partial summaries. Then they have to compare these, which is not an English skill at all. Imagine maths students being asked to compare two quadratic equations, or a student of Spanish being asked to compare Spanish to English – it really is that level of irrelevance.

3. There are only 20 marks available out of 80 which involve students considering the author’s use of language and ideas – the bedrock of English literature and the art of reading. The other 60 reading marks are garnered in a host of artificial, problematic ways, which have only a tangential relationship with mastering the subject.

4. Students’ writing tasks are also appalling. The incidence of 350-500 word descriptions in published novels is rarer than a three legged elephant, yet it is the most frequent writing task on paper 1. The choice to write a story is mostly rejected, but what 16 year old can be expected to craft a coherent story of 500 words in 45 minutes? Given 60 to 90 minutes they might craft something brilliant. In 45 they write dross and feel a failure.

5. The literature papers are, if anything, worse. Students compare poems, by different poets, which may have only an idea in common. The comparison is both arbitrary and meaningless, and all to be done in 45 minutes, which means that both poems must be glossed over. It’s trite and superficial, and prevents students fully engaging with either poem or, God forbid, the craft of the poet.

6. Just to make a point, they are then asked to compare two unseen poems, in even more superficial ways, because it goes without saying, they barely know the poem.

7. They do get to write in detail about a poem, but it is an unseen poem – devoid of any context, either literary or historical, or of the poet’s life or intentions, as a puzzle to be solved with many of the pieces missing. You might as well give them a jigsaw with words on each piece, and ask them to put it together. That would have just as much of a relationship to English literature.

8. Two of the three essay questions are anything but. They ask the students to write about an extract, and then about the text as a whole. This is the opposite of writing a coherent argument, defending a point of view and dismissing alternatives. It is anti-literature in the same way it is anti-thinking.

Imagine being asked to plan a driving holiday by randomly going to different places, criss-crossing your route with no attention to the distance between places and the overall direction of travel. Absurd.

Instead, you want to plan a route that is efficient and rewarding. This is an exact analogy of the extract question which makes smooth planning almost impossible, especially as the examiners (arbitrarily, and without any reference to the mark scheme) tell the students to write “starting with the extract”).

The Decline of Essay Writing

Overwhelmingly, essays are seen as the equivalent of Everest, something only some select year 11 students are expected to do well, and something all students are only supposed to put up with for 45 minutes, lest their 21st century attention spans suck them into a vortex of despair.

People who should know better (Daisy Christodoulou, David Didau) claim that 45 minute essay writing is like running a marathon, and students have to train gradually for this gruelling event. This is nonsense. 2000-3000 word essays and coursework used to be the staple of studying English, and also coincided with English literature being the number 1 A level choice.

Guess what, it turns out that training students to write in depth makes them much better students of literature, and apparently also makes them much more likely to enjoy and value the subject. Who knew – getting better at something worthwhile and challenging is its own reward?

Instead, we have spent the past 7 years dumbing down our subject so that it bears little resemblance to the subject we love.

How the GCSE is Killing the Key Stage 3 Curriculum

Students find this exam difficult for all sorts of reasons I haven’t covered here. The mark allocation is arbitrary – questions worth the same amount of marks require radically different time limits to complete. The speed of the exam, and the way questions are sequenced, means many students give up with over 50% of the marks still to come.

So, how do teachers respond to this catastrophe? Rather than go back to first principles – what makes an excellent student of English – they take the arbitrary GCSE questions and begin setting them from year 7 onward.

They buy into the idea of ‘the knowledge rich curriculum’ and cram KS3 with GCSE texts (those ones which are too difficult to entrust to year 11, or thanks to Mr Gove, too American to poison the minds of 16 year olds).

Then they overwhelmingly choose the very easiest text to examine – An Inspector Calls, A Christmas Carol … short, easy, lacking in complex ideas.

If you want to think about what an English curriculum ought to be, ask English teachers to take a moment and imagine that GCSE exams have disappeared. Then ask them to devise assessment tasks which they value. Their list might include writing:

1.     short stories of 500-2000 words

2.     poems, or an anthology

3.     articles about something they care about

4.     autobiography

5.     creative writing pieces of 500-1000 words

6.     blogs for the school newspaper, or website

7.     interviews with grandparents or someone they admire

8.     essays of 500-2000 words, following a theme or a character

6 of these would probably occur in each of years 7-9.

Instead, these typically happen only once in one year and, in many cases, do not occur at all.

Death by Annotation

Annotation is by far the dominant technique used by English teachers. It’s everywhere you look. Poems are beaten to a pulp with colour coding and naming of parts. Novels and plays are buried under the weight of copied notes.

In the last bit of student voice I carried out, students from a brilliant teacher’s class told me they loved annotation. Great, I said. Show me how many of the quotations they found useful in an essay. They struggled to pick out any – by which I mean, they had no way of discerning whether one quotation was more significant or useful than the next. Finally I asked them to imagine I stopped any teacher annotation more than 3 quotations on a page of a text. They were horrified. How could they possibly learn this way? Fine, I said, what’s the lowest maximum they would let me set? 10 annotations per page.

We have created unthinking dependence. We have stopped our students engaging with the big ideas of the texts they read. They have no clue how texts speak to each other over time, how literary movements are in conversation with the past, how authors are constantly engaging with the ideas of the time.

Vocabulary Teaching

Every school I visit now teaches deliberate vocabulary instruction. Students meet a definition, a sentence or two, and then put the word into a sentence of their own. None of them get through more than 5 words in 30 minutes. It’s not just mind numbingly dull, it doesn’t even work. None of the schools I work with can counter this, because they don’t test this vocabulary weeks and months later to see what is in long term memory.

Every bit of research you will ever read about vocabulary acquisition will tell you that what is necessary is repetition over time, in different contexts. Most of these pieces of research will persuade you that the best way to improve students’ vocabularies is through improving their reading. And arguably the best way to improve the vocabulary students meeting through reading is to read to them.

If you are still here – thank you – you care about English as much as I do. If you would like to know how to resurrect it, and teach it in a joyful way which brings enjoyment and mastery to you and your students, you should read my book, The Full English: How to be a brilliant English teacher

If you want to be brilliant English teacher, you’ll like The Full English

If you want to find out how to get great progress from students in any subject, you’ll like The Slightly Awesome Teacher

If you want to pass Ofsted with flying colours, you’ll like The Unofficial Ofsted Survival Guide

If you want a quick guide to How to Improve Your School, click here