GCSE English Literature Exams

Helen Jones Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 172405 relating to GCSE English Literature exams.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main, for the last Petitions Committee debate of this Parliament. I must confess that when I saw the petition, I had mixed feelings. English is my subject: it was what I was most interested in at school, I read English at university and my first job was teaching English. Being of my generation, my head is stuffed full of quotations from Shakespeare to Keats to D. H. Lawrence. My colleagues know that my party piece around this time of year is reciting the opening of the general prologue to “The Canterbury Tales” in middle English, but I will not inflict that on people here.

That knowledge of literature has hugely enriched my life, and I hope that it has enriched my students’ lives too; when they get back in touch with me after I have been in the papers, they say so. But—this is a big “but”— as the great cultural commentator Raymond Williams said, we are all prone to value the kind of education that we received over and above any other kind, but what we choose to teach, and how we choose to teach it, is a selection from what is available. He talked about

“what is thought of as an education being in fact a particular selection, a set of emphases and omissions”.

When we consider examinations, the question is what children should learn and how they should learn in order to be fitted for the world in which they will grow up, which will be very different from the one in which we grew up. In my experience, that question is seldom asked by Governments. We are normally subject to the whims of various Secretaries of State; some, perhaps, have had more than others. For instance, we heard about the need to teach “our island story”; then an English baccalaureate certificate was proposed and later abandoned. It is no wonder that teachers often find themselves in a whirlwind. No sooner have they got used to one set of instructions than they must get used to another. In all this, the fundamental questions about what we need to teach our children for the future are not dealt with.

Before I go on, I must say clearly that I think that the study of literature is enormously important for an understanding of oneself and society. Think of Chaucer’s pilgrims, chattering away down the centuries. Their jobs might not exist anymore, but the people can still be met, with all their strengths and weaknesses, in any street in any town. Nor do I believe that much literature is intrinsically too difficult for our children. I have taught Shakespeare to 11-year-olds. I got teenage boys to read Jane Austen by pointing out that her brothers read the books aloud to the officers of Nelson’s Navy, not notable for being a set of wimps. If Shakespeare’s groundlings could follow his plays, I see no reason why our children cannot—provided, of course, that it is a good juicy murder; there is nothing more boring than having to explain 500-year-old jokes to a class.

Although the choice of text is always one for teachers, it makes my blood boil when I hear people say that some things are too difficult for working-class children, because I was one myself. I say that because when people criticise the exam system, they are often accused of wanting to dumb things down. Nothing could be further from the truth in my case. It is true that the Government have changed the GCSE English literature syllabus so that it is now a linear subject with exams at the end of the course. A new grading system will be introduced this year, and coursework has been abandoned. That is consistent with this Government’s approach to examinations in most subjects.

I grew up with that system, and I was fortunate enough to be good at it, because I was blessed with a good memory, but I am not sure that I agree entirely with Ofqual when it says:

“We do not believe there are any skills in the draft content for English literature that could not be validly assessed by written exam, set and marked by the exam board.”

I might agree that the skills in the syllabus can be tested by an examination at the end, but whether those are the right skills is a different question. There is a place for a more extended and in-depth response to texts, especially those dealing with complex subjects and emotions.

That is where open-book exams can be important. The Government have abandoned the idea of coursework, although it might have been better to change the guidance and the time limits, but I believe that open-book exams can ask far more stretching and difficult questions of our children. The Government rightly said:

“Students should not be misled into believing that they will get good marks simply by memorising and writing out the poems or texts they have studied.”

That has always been the case, as any teacher knows, but the Government also said:

“Students will not need to learn and remember the exact words of poems or texts by heart.”

Moreover, the former chief regulator said in a blog post:

“Assessment is about learning and understanding, not memory.”

I would be convinced by that if not for one thing: in literature, the exact words are important. A great writer chooses words with precision. An approximation of what they said might not have the same force or convey the same sentiments.

The Minister might, like me, be old enough to remember the Morecambe and Wise sketch in which Shakespeare is writing rubbish and the milkman keeps coming in and helping him. Shakespeare writes, “It’s very cold, I said to Yorkie,” and the milkman suggests, “How about, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’?” [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell- Buck) is laughing because she is definitely not old enough to remember it.

The Minister will also remember George Orwell’s strictures on people who use “petite” when they mean “little” and then say that it means “dainty”, or his way of curing people of using the construction “not un-”:

“A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”

Words matter. Words, like facts, are stubborn things. One must remember a great deal to be able to answer some of the questions in our GCSE exams properly.

The Government, and certainly Ofqual, might argue that extended and more difficult questions can be asked about the unseen texts in the exam. However, strangely, Ofqual prohibits people from having a whole text in front of them, saying:

“We do not expect an awarding organisation to provide a whole text as Stimulus Materials for an assessment for a GCSE Qualification in English Literature.”

I might believe that Ofqual understood what it was talking about if it did not switch from singular to plural in the same sentence and put totally unnecessary capital letters on “stimulus materials”.

I must admit that I am a bit of a sceptic about unseen texts in exams. I used to tell my students, “This is a completely useless exercise, but we will now learn to outwit the examiners,” and they did. We do not actually read literature like that. We do not read extracts; we read plays, novels or poems. It is Leavisite literary critical theory taken to its ultimate. It is a prime example of doing things because we have always done them like that.

The answer to the central question of whether open-book exams are better than exams without the text is that, as always, it depends what we want to test. Whatever Ofqual says, an exam that students take without the text in front of them depends to a large extent on memory. It is impossible to comment properly on a text, for instance to show how an author deals with characterisation, without being able to remember large parts of it. It is impossible to compare two poems without being able to remember large parts of them. Remembering, in itself, does not get a student good marks, but it is an essential prerequisite to answering many of the questions, as a number of the teachers who responded to our consultation pointed out. One said:

“Students must remember lines off by heart, as they are required to analyse them… It is a minimum requirement for the modern text question, as there is no extract.”

As a test of memory, that is not bad, but is that all we want to test? Many people would argue that open-book exams, on the other hand, allow more searching questions to be asked of students. They allow students to do more analysis and evaluation and to synthesise knowledge rather than repeat it. In other words, open-book exams are higher up Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, which teachers know about because they learn about it in training. It is also true that the skills required in an open-book exam are more like those that we use in real life—it is very seldom that we have to produce a piece of work in a rigid time limit, without recourse to any resources. It all depends on the examination being designed properly.

Open-book examinations have disadvantages, too. For instance, it is much more difficult to ensure that students have a clean text in front of them, without notes. There is also an argument that they may deter students from getting fully involved in the literature that they have to study, because they rely on having the book in front of them. It is often said that having the book makes the exams easier, although I am afraid that I disagree. I did open-book exams at university for some of my subjects—the Chaucer and Shakespeare unseen papers, which in those days were six hours long—and we had to know the texts very well to know where to look for quotations in the first place. I confess that I have not found a lot of evidence—it may exist, but other pressures have arisen—but the research that I have been able to find, from Washington University in St Louis, found that both sorts of tests enhanced retention of information.

The other issue that we ought to think about carefully is that our children are growing up in an age of information overload. They probably need to learn much more than we did about how to access information, assess its value, organise it and apply it. That may be done in other examinations, but it could also be part of our English literature examination. As I said at the beginning, my head is stuffed full of quotations, and I believe that to really engage with a piece of literature, a reader has to memorise some of it and make sure that they have internalised it. However, I also think that open-book exams can ask more testing questions. They can achieve what the Government say they want, which is to ensure that the brightest pupils can show what they are capable of.

There is a case for both kinds of examination, and the Government should think seriously about making at least some English literature exams open-book in future, but the real issue is that for a long time we have not thought seriously about what our children should learn and how they should learn it. I know that the Minister has a genuine interest in providing the best possible education for young people in this country; he and I may sometimes disagree about methods, but I do not doubt his commitment. Since this Parliament is coming to its end, little can be done at the moment, but I hope that in future he will apply his mind to what exactly we want to test through different types of examination. There is no getting away from the fact that being good at English literature requires some feats of memory, but that is not all we should try to test. I hope that we will think about that, and about what the petition asks for, in future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Jones]

There is very little for me to say, except to thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) for her contribution. I listened carefully to the Minister’s detailed response, and thank him for it. No doubt we will discuss the matter at length on other occasions. In the meantime, may I say what a pleasure it has been to chair the Petitions Committee and that I wish colleagues if not the best of luck, at least a sunny election campaign, with little rain?

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 172405 relating to GCSE English Literature exams.