ABSTRACT
Setting the scene over the past few years – although to many it may seem more like an eternity, and not in the liberating Blakean sense either – English teachers in secondary schools have become increasingly used to living with number, weight and measure. The National Curriculum, ushered in by the 1988 Education Act and, for English, substantially revised since, has been largely responsible for the obsession with measurement. Not that 1988 was a year of dearth as far as most secondary English teachers were concerned: new examination syllabuses at 16 and 18, based largely on coursework, opened up exciting opportunities for effective and innovative teaching of both language and literature, increasingly integrated at all levels. At the same time pioneering work was going on in English departments in a range of other areas: speaking and listening; integration with drama; media education; active approaches to literature, including Shakespeare; awareness and knowledge of the workings of language; and collaboration with other curricular subjects. If there was dearth, it perhaps arrived as a result of and simultaneously with the fashion for ‘objective’ measurement, rather than pre-dating it, and this is of course precisely what I imagine Blake himself meant. As Knight (1996: 22) has it:
This is quite an indictment. But what English teachers have to do, and in many cases are doing, is to convert this threat into an opportunity: not only to live with the National Curriculum, but actually to make it work for us. The most thorough revision of the National Curriculum, for English as for the other school subjects, was from 2000 (DfEE/QCA 1999). This edition was firmly embedded in classroom practice, largely uncontroversially
despite what D’Arcy (2000: 30) has described as ‘the increasingly formalistic emphasis’ and a rather more terse, instructional tone than that used previously. In fact its impact has been lessened somewhat by the introduction of the National Strategy (or National Literacy Strategy – NLS – as it once was and is still often known) at secondary level in 2001: English departments have been far more concerned with its wide-ranging and profound implications than with any changes in the National Curriculum itself. This preoccupation, of course, turned out to be prescient, as the latest manifestation of the National Curriculum, instrumental for Year 7 from 2008-9 and for subsequent Secondary year groups over the respective following 4 years, has in fact conflated the Strategy with the National Curriculum itself. This new curriculum is itself rather more fluid than its previous manifestations, a characteristic underlined by its availability only online, where any revisions or amendments are also publicised. The next chapter deals in more detail with the impact of the Strategy.
