The “bleeding down” of GCSEEnglish teachinginto lower year groups is deterring studentsfrom reading for pleasure, according to a subject expert.
The warning comes after a little-reported finding in last week’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) resultsrevealed a steep fall in the proportion of English teenagers who read for pleasure.
In the Pisa research,nearly half - 48 per cent - of English 15-year-olds reported they did not read for enjoyment, compared with an average of 42 per cent of pupils across the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
ٱ:
辱ԾDz:‘It’s everyone’s job to encourage reading for pleasure’
Exclusive: Only a quarter of pupils get recommended reading for pleasure time
Just 26 per cent of English students reported reading for more than half an hour per day for pleasure, compared with 34 per cent across the OECD (see graph, below).
And the proportion of studentswho said they read for pleasure in England had declined more rapidly than the OECD average since 2009, by nine percentage points compared with fivepercentage points on average across the OECD.
ԲԻ’soverall reading scoresin Pisaimproved slightly, with the country placed 13th in the 2018 results -up from 17th in 2015.
‘The impact of GCSE reforms’
Rachel Roberts, from the National Association for the Teaching of English,told teachersat a recentevent in Londonthat the “bleeding down” of GCSE English into the earlier years of secondary schooling was responsible for a decline in pupils reading for pleasure.
Ms Roberts, a PGCE secondary English tutor at the University of Reading,said: “At key stage 3, there’s considerable evidence of the bleeding down of GCSE into earlier years, where GCSE texts are taught lower down the school as a way of getting through content, as well as including GCSE-style questions for Year 7.”
A new, “more rigorous”GCSE English syllabus was introduced in 2015 as part of reforms brought in by former education secretary Michael Gove.
The revised English literature GCSE is based entirely on a linear, end-of-course closed-book exam. Studentsneed to write critically about a Shakespeare text, a 19th-century novel and poetry from memory, while the reformed English language GCSE requires studentsto analyse unseen passages from the 19th century.
The Department for Education’s position is that the revised GCSEspreparestudents for the world of work and were implemented after a long and careful process of reform.
But Ms Roberts said thechanges had restricted the type oftexts being taught to younger students, puttingthem off reading -a change that she felt had fed into the Pisa results.
She said:“Because of the nature of the current GCSE syllabus, which heavily emphasises classics and linear exams, that has had an impact on how pupils view reading, as well as how English is taught lower down in the school.
“It’s also had an impact at key stage 3, affecting the choice of texts taught lower down the school, that are quite Victorian, squeezing out more diverse or young-adult fiction.”
And she said the Pisa findings that English studentsfound it hard todistinguish between fact and fiction could partly be attributed to alack of contemporarymedia texts being taught in the revised English languageGCSE.
Fewer students ‘reading for pleasure’
“That element of teaching about media texts does not feature at all in the GCSE -there might be a probable link with pupils’ inability to tell the difference between fact and fiction,” she said.
“When they are taught non-fiction, it is from the 19th century, which has no connection with the kind of texts pupils read online.”
Percentage of pupils who saythey read for enjoyment
Source: Pisa 2018
But there was a significant reduction in English pupils reading newspapers and magazines.
Just 18 per cent of English pupils reported reading newspapers several times a month voluntarily, compared with 60 per cent in 2009, while 10 per cent reported reading magazines in 2018 compared with 60 per cent in 2009.
This echoed patterns across the OECD, but the decline was more pronounced for England.
Source: Pisa 2018
The Department for Education has been approached for comment.
