GCSE English Literature Exams

Helen Jones Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 200299 relating to GCSE English literature exams.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma.

The more perceptive among us will remember that we have been here before. We debated this issue just before the general election. I think it was on the last full day of business. Understandably, the debate was rather rushed and the Petitions Committee did not have time to do any public engagement on the matter.

When we received a new petition in this Parliament, we therefore decided to schedule it for debate and to conduct some public engagement. We had a huge response, showing that people believe that how we examine and test pupils’ knowledge is not just a technical matter; it says much about the things we think are important—the skills and knowledge that we value. People are also increasingly worried about the mental health of our young people. I will come to that later.

There are many exam systems throughout the world, and they do not necessarily relate to the success or failure of the education system. On the one hand, there are systems such as those used in Singapore and Hong Kong, where there is rigorous and frequent testing. Those are very good at some things—there is no doubt about that. However, when I was in Singapore some years ago, people asked us how to teach creativity, because they thought they had ironed that out of their system. On the other hand, in Finland nobody sits an exam until they are 16 and it is viewed as one of the best education systems in the world—on some measures, the best. I do not say that because I think Ministers can import exam systems from elsewhere. In fact, over the years we have had far too much of Ministers going abroad and trying to bring in a system from a completely different cultural background. I am simply saying that how we examine is a choice—one choice among many.

It is clear from the feedback that both parents and teachers are worried about the impact of frequent testing and the type of testing we have on young people’s mental health. Way back in 2016, what was then the Association of Teachers and Lecturers did a survey of its members. Over half of the respondents said that they knew one student who had tried to self-harm. One of the teachers said that there had been

“a huge increase in physical symptoms of stress and incidents of self-harm.”

On the other hand, the chief inspector of schools has told The Times Educational Supplement that it is a “myth” that children in England are over-tested. It is difficult to know who to believe: the teachers who are on the ground every day or a chief inspector with no teaching qualifications at all, whose nomination was rejected by the Select Committee on Education. I will leave people to make their choice.

It is true that there is a lot of mental ill health among young people today. The charity YoungMinds published figures showing that one in four children and young adults displays symptoms of mental ill health, and that one in 10 children and one in five young adults has a diagnosable mental health disorder.

When we did our public engagement on this subject, we found that mental health was an issue for many people. We carried out some public engagement with pupils from Christ the King Catholic High School in Preston, to whom we are very grateful. Our staff used those responses to design an online survey for students, teachers and parents. There were extra boxes for teachers to allow them to make comments. We had more than 16,300 responses. Of the students involved, 54% said that they thought about exams most of the time and 53% said that they were stressed most of the time because of their exams.

Interestingly, that was not the prime reason for people wanting a change in the system. The main reason was that they felt exams tested memory rather than understanding —77% of students and 84% of teachers told us that. That gives people like me pause. I grew up in a system—like most people here, I suspect—where memory was important. We had to remember lots of things for exams. I was lucky: I did not find it particularly difficult. However, we need to ask not what was suitable for us, but what is suitable for the next generation. We need to ask ourselves, is it really necessary to have so much emphasis on memory in a society where information is available at the touch of a button? That question hardly ever gets asked in our system.

We are often dependent—this has happened under both political parties—on the whims of whichever Secretary of State for Education happens to be in office at the time. We all remember the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who decided that history should be “our island story”, ignoring the fact that that story is probably seen very differently in different parts of these islands and by different communities within them. He also took a sudden dislike to “Of Mice and Men” being on the curriculum. I do not know why—perhaps he was hit over the head with a Steinbeck novel when he was small and has been traumatised ever since.

Because of that, we have seen frequent changes to our exam system. We had the English baccalaureate. We had tiering, which came and went. We had coursework and then the abolition of coursework. Then we had linear courses with exams at the end. It is no surprise, therefore, that the current Secretary of State has had to promise teachers that there will be no more changes, in an attempt to woo people into the profession. Frankly, I am surprised there are any teachers left. In all this noise, what does not get asked is, what do children need to learn and how do they need to learn it to fit them for the society that they are growing up in, rather than the one that we grew up in?

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I have a terrible memory problem. I can barely remember one thing from one day to another. The reason for the change we have made is to try to raise standards. Has the hon. Lady considered the impact of this change on standards?

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[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point and I will come to it later. I do not think that there is any evidence that that change raises standards per se. In an exam, we measure certain things. The question is, are we measuring the right things?

In saying that, I am not at all an advocate of dumbing down. When I taught English, my students studied Shakespeare from when they came into secondary school, they read “Beowulf”—in translation, I hasten to add; I was not trying to teach 12-year-olds old English—and they read Chaucer, even when they were not in the exam. Ironically, the evidence we are getting from a lot of teachers is that the emphasis on drilling people for an exam, and the tyranny of that, is sucking creativity out of the system and narrowing people’s focus, rather than widening it. While I do not believe that any great literature is inaccessible if it is taught in the right way, I am an advocate of asking the right questions. An English degree teaches one to do that. That cannot be expressed in monetary terms, in the way some people would have it, but it is a useful skill.

One question is whether what children learn and the way they are tested is the right way forward. At the moment, they have to study a Shakespeare play—I do not think anyone would argue with that; Shakespeare is our leading dramatist—and 15 poems, with most teachers thinking there is a reasonable selection that engages children. They need to study a 19th-century novel. That gives me pause for thought—why the 19th century? It was not when the novel began or when most of the experimentation was done. They then study another text—a modern text or a play—and they have to do unseens as well. We test them on all that literature at the end of the course. There is no coursework or interim exams. We have to ask whether that is the right way forward.

When this system was first mooted, Ofqual said:

“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.”

No doubt that is true of what is in the curriculum, but the issue is whether that is the right thing to be testing. From what they have said, the Government seem to have what I can only describe as a rather strange approach. At one point they 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.”

I hope not—that has never been the case in any English literature exam. However, they went on to say:

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

I am afraid that misunderstands the subject. In great literature, the exact words are important. Great writers choose words with precision, rejecting alternatives. An approximation will not do, because it does not have the same levels of meaning. When studying English literature, or any literature, the exact words matter. To suggest otherwise is to downgrade the subject. It shows what the Government say they do not want: a lack of academic rigour. In this exam, are our young people facing a test of memory or of understanding?

All literature exams involve some feat of memory. Students have to get to know the text well; they have to read it, re-read it and internalise it. Nor can we take the stress out of exams completely. In fact, some stress is good for us. We have to face stress in life and learn to deal with it. The young people who responded to our survey recognised that. Many suggested that they should have more education in how to deal with stress. Nor is all stress that our young people suffer because of exams. There are lots of stresses in modern life that impact on young people and create a toxic environment for them. I am not by any means suggesting that here, but I am suggesting that unnecessary stress is caused because of the emphasis on memory.

The teachers who responded to our survey were very clear that the exam is in large part about memory. One said:

“The argument that students do not need to quote is simply untrue”.

Another said:

“I have found it to be more of a memory test for my pupils.”

One teacher pointed out that to analyse the language in a text, students have to remember it. They have to be able to remember the rhyme schemes in poems to compare them, and doing so is in the mark scheme. The fear among many teachers was that this was sucking the joy out of the subject. As one said:

“We are systematically sucking the love of literature and poetry out of students.”

Another said:

“We are killing their love of English.”

In the current system, we have an examination that imposes unnecessary stress—as I said, some stress is inevitable—on students; that relies largely on memory, rather than on understanding; and that, according to many teachers who responded to us, is not fostering a love of literature at all, but killing it. If, in an exam, students are going to analyse character in a novel, compare two poems or contrast two scenes in a play, they have to remember them. On the other hand, if there are open-book exams with clean texts, more questions can be asked. Contrary to what the Government think, it is arguable that open-book exams test higher levels of skill. We could actually start to ensure that questions are designed to bring out the best in the brightest students. The Government seem to want to do that, hence their new grading system, but are unwilling to will the means.

An open-book exam allows students to evaluate, analyse and synthesise knowledge, rather than simply remember it. Many teachers who responded to us felt that the current system, far from what was intended, does not allow their brightest students to display what they can do sufficiently well. Open-book exams are far from an easy option. A lot of work still has to be done on the text beforehand. At a very basic level, the students have to know where to look in order to finish on time. Most of the teachers who responded thought that it was a better system. One said that

“open book exams allow for questions that explore deeper understanding of ideas, historical context, inference and themes”.

By contrast, one teacher who recently retired, but had 37 years’ experience teaching English, which should be respected, said that the current curriculum

“narrows and stultifies their thinking—and their lessons”.

Arguably, open-book exams would not only ask more demanding questions of students, but put them in a situation that is closer to what they will experience in real life. No academic writes a paper without reference to anything else, purely from memory. No one writes a business report or prepares a submission like that. We all have access to texts and information while we do such things. I do not even think that the exams prepare our young people properly for employment. Interestingly, one of our respondents told us:

“As an employer as well as a parent, the skills I’m seeking in employees are the ability to analyse, to infer, to construct an argument and so on, not whether they can remember entire texts.”

Of course, students are not asked to remember entire texts in the exam, but they are asked to remember a large part of them.

With respect to the Government and the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), who talked about standards, we would be able to test higher levels of ability better with a different kind of examination. When I was teaching, I noticed that it was possible for my best students not to do as well in their GCSE exams as they would do at A-level, where they were allowed to do much more analysis on their own. The Government are falling into a trap of thinking that what we have done in the past is the best way for the future.

When I was training to be a teacher, everyone knew a story about the sabre-toothed curriculum. It was about a tribe that taught its children to hunt sabre-toothed tigers, trap little woolly mammoths and fish in the river, until the ice came and the sabre-toothed tigers moved away, the little woolly mammoths died and the river iced over. But the tribe still taught its children to hunt sabre-toothed tigers, trap little woolly mammoths and fish in the river. One day, an iconoclast among the tribe said, “Why are we doing this? There aren’t any sabre-toothed tigers, little woolly mammoths or fish in the river.” The elders said, “We don’t do it because we want our children to hunt sabre-toothed tigers, trap little woolly mammoths and fish in the river. We do it because it is character building.” The tribe carried on doing that, and died.

The lesson for examinations is simple. We need to look at what will equip our children for the future, not for the past. I hope the Minister will think seriously about that, because the evidence from people trying to work in the system is that it is far from satisfactory.

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[Nick Gibb]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to the specifics of that later.

Through reading, pupils develop cultural literacy— my hon. Friend is an example of someone with great cultural literacy—and the shared knowledge that connects our society. Reading also helps to create shared bonds. From understanding references to a Catch-22 situation to sharing knowledge of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, literature contributes much to the underpinning ties that hold us together.

It is important that pupils have the opportunity to study a range of high-quality, intellectually challenging and substantial texts from our literary heritage. The new and more rigorous GCSE in English literature requires pupils to read and understand a wide range of important texts across many eras. Under the old GCSE, pupils were examined on four texts at most. Some were examined on only three: two texts and a poetry anthology or anthologies. There was no requirement for pupils to be asked questions on texts they had not previously studied —unseen texts—although exam boards could use them if they wished. The remaining texts were covered through controlled assessment, which is a form of coursework. Ofqual decided that new GCSEs in the subject would be assessed entirely by exam, as that is a more reliable and fairer method.

The new English literature GCSE requires pupils to study a range of high-quality, challenging and substantial texts, including at least one Shakespeare play; one 19th-century novel; a selection of poetry since 1789, including representative Romantic poetry; and fiction or drama from the British Isles since 1914. The requirements for poetry and a novel from the 1800s are new and add more breadth and rigour to the qualification. There is also a requirement for pupils to study no fewer than 15 poems by at least five different poets with a minimum of 300 lines of poetry in total. That element is designed to ensure that pupils gain a deep understanding of literature and read widely throughout the course. As my hon. Friend said, pupils are not required to learn the poems by heart. Instead, the purpose of studying a wide range of poetry is to develop an appreciation of the form and to support pupils to understand the importance of literature across the ages.

[Helen Jones]

Will the Minister explain how pupils can analyse language in the exam without remembering the language used?

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[Helen Jones]

There have been interesting contributions to the debate. I particularly commend my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) for talking about the higher-level learning that can be tested in open-book exams. That is perhaps what the Minister missed when he responded to the debate.

All of us want to see standards rise, but to equate rising standards with a particular form of examination is to confuse two different things. The question is always about what we are testing. I note that the Minister said pupils do not have to use quotes, but then said there will be extra marks for the intelligent use of text and quotes, which is precisely why teachers need to teach their children to memorise a lot of the text—because they want them to get high marks.

We could do much better by our children. That does not mean abandoning a shared cultural heritage. Teachers are telling us that they are seeing fewer children applying to do A-level English because they have been put off by what is now expected of them in GCSE English literature.

The Minister illustrated the importance of the exact words when he referred to our understanding of things such as Catch-22. When Heller wrote the book he first called it “Catch-14”. When he was asked why he changed it, he said that 22 was funnier than 14, which illustrates exactly why the exact words are important.

If we are to test students at a higher level to enable our best students to show what they can do, we should move away from making our exams so much a test of memory and towards encouraging our children to do more analysis and evaluation of the text and to develop the skills that they will need in their future lives.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 200299 relating to GCSE English literature exams.