The joy of making curriculum choices in English

By Seb Collett

Being the Director of Learning for English, I firmly believe I have the most interesting job in the school, and part of that is due to the selection of texts. While for some subjects the National Curriculum makes all the decisions for you, for English the texts we hone our students’ skills on is a topic of constant discussion, so I thought it might be interesting to show you my thinking on some examples.

For KS5 the key word is breadth; there is a huge range of text we can choose, and all the middle leaders in English before me have come up with a fantastic curriculum, including the troubling novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, the horror movie Get Out, and the graphic memoir Persepolis. Ultimately we have to think about what will bring a new vantage to our students. Due to the IB often being comparative, it is interesting to match up texts. I particularly love comparing Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. They are so thematically similar, while being created in such different epochs with radically different purposes.

KS4 is more focused on the GCSEs, and so we have a small range of texts to choose from. And with that exam focus, we chose Macbeth over Romeo and Juliet: both are brilliant plays, but Macbeth has much stronger context to write about. An Inspector Calls also has good context, but the reason it is taught year after year is its popularity with the students. They love to argue who is most to blame for Eva’s death, and with increasing inequality in the UK, it is a text that becomes more and more relevant as time goes on.

KS3 - this is where it gets fun. We have so much freedom to mix and match. For instance, we study the classic myths in a pacey, feminist retelling with Burton’s Medusa. We use A Monster Calls to explore the very challenging issues of grief. Of Mice and Men was a regular text, once a staple of the GCSEs, then when that was scrapped moved to KS3 in pretty much every school in the country. But students and teachers over the last 5 years have become more and more vocal about the unacceptability of the language. And so we replaced it with Ugly Dogs Don’t Cry, an adaptation set around Westbourne Grove, and we can invite the writer to talk to our Year 9s every year. And while A View from a Bridge has some of the best dialogue written in the English language, we replaced it with the play of Small Island, so making the same themes of immigration and forbidden love more relevant to the experiences of Londoners.

And it is not over. We are always thinking about how we will use the terribly precious resource of time to select a new text and ready it for our students. What will we choose next year? Will the unpopular A Christmas Carol get cut? What new texts will be introduced to IB Literature?

What do you feel students should be reading in school?