This essay explores the importance of formative creative writing in schools through a Key Stage 3 Creative Writing lunchtime club. I examine the power of unassessed and unconstrained writing through the work of one Year 8 pupil in the early stages of English language acquisition, who so often chooses to write about snow. Reflecting on her writing,…

This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

There is a growing consensus that the study of literature in English secondary schools is suffering a crisis: a fixation with knowledge and facts, a loss of creativity, and a denigration of students' own experience, to name a few. This article argues that this is, in part, a result of the conception of culture embedded in the current National…

The British government's current educational policy for England draws on E.D. Hirsch's writings on 'cultural literacy'. This paper aims to uncover the roots of Hirsch's influential views through a genealogical critique. Hirsch admired the Scottish Enlightenment educator Hugh Blair as a model architect of a hegemonic culture to unite disparate…

This paper argues that there is scope for considerable change and improvement in the way in which Poetry is taught at Key Stage Two in Northern Ireland. In making this case for significant improvement, the paper has three interconnected parts. In the first part, a range of critical ideas highlight the richness of poetry as a literary genre.…

China's impressive growth over the last three decades warrants the need to re-evaluate the position and positioning of English in the country's educational system. For long, English has been taught and learned compulsorily alongside Chinese and maths in primary and secondary schools in the mainland of China. It was not until recent years that the…

Just after the First World War the English Association published The Teaching of English in Schools. It argues that developing children's 'creative spirit' is fundamental to maintaining peace in Europe. Seventy years later, the first National Curriculum promotes a creative, unitary English appropriate for 'a European context'. In contrast, today's…

British Conservatives happily acknowledge the debt that they owe to E.D. Hirsch. To understand the nature of their curricular project, and how it is located within the wider goals of education and social policy, we need to attend carefully to the character of this transatlantic borrowing. Its emphases and omissions reveal much about the…

This essay focuses on two sites of memory in my professional life. One is from my very early years of teaching, the second from about 10 years later. Each is centred on a moment of controversy in English curriculum in New South Wales, Australia, and each is to do with the teaching of writing and the supposed neglect of language study, including…

I explore a series of incidents in my English classroom, which occurred while I was preparing my students for their high-stakes GCSE English Language exam ('Paper 2: Writers' viewpoints and perspectives'). I thereby attempt to confront some of my own failings and biases with regard to non-fiction and the teaching of persuasive writing in…

It is now five years since the introduction of the current National Curriculum for English in England; it is just over 50 years since the Dartmouth Conference drew together American and English educationalists. This paper reports on a hermeneutic study that presents voices from the field of English teaching in England. It asks questions of today's…

This article uses documentary evidence to review debates on spoken language and learning in the UK over recent decades. It argues that two different models of talk have been at stake: one that wishes to "correct" children's spoken language and another than encourages children to use talk to learn and represent their worlds. The article…

Starting with the writer's own experience as a reader, this article discusses poetry by Eric Roach, Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Edward Baugh, Michael Smith and Velma Pollard. It explores the sense of place felt by writer and reader, going on to analyse the poets' use of Nation Language, poetic metre and intertextuality in…

This essay explores the problematic nature of an enforced monolingual culture promoted by the current Conservative-led UK government. It comments upon the paradoxical nature of the 2014 curriculum that promotes heritage texts and "proper" English, when such poets embraced a Bakhtinian tolerance of languages. It focuses primarily upon the…

How to understand and argue for the nature and place of literary texts and experience in contemporary English curriculum has been and continues to be the subject of much debate. While literature as traditionally conceptualised remains an important presence in much English curriculum, the notion of what "literature" is, or what the…