O reason not the need to rescue English in our schools

“Something wicked this way comes…”.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have taught Macbeth. So many times, in fact, that I might be forgiven for having become numb to its visceral capacity to invoke a sense of foreboding. But I  do have a tendency to catastrophise, and something in Shakespeare’s immortal words feel chillingly apt for the current state of English education in England.

Look at that again: a sentence so paradoxical as to defy logic. A disruption of the natural order, perhaps. (Or to borrow from another of Shakespeare’s tragedies: “The time is out of joint.”)

Unlike Shakespeare’s Scotland, we are not facing a sudden exposure to malevolent forces but a creeping erosion. Literacy stagnates. Appreciation for the power of language dwindles. There is a systemic failure to nurture the next generation of readers, writers, and – most worrying of all for readers of these pages – teachers.

We can blame some people for this. We can point to the insistence on STEM. We can point to our mate Rishi and his big maths energy. But we might also do well to look in the mirror.

This is, to some degree, a consequence of industrial-scale self-flagellation, the stark results of which are now playing out in classrooms across the country.

Reading novels is hard: here’s an extract.

Shakespeare is tricky: here’s a modern translation.

Poetry is obscure: here’s an acronym.

And then the overcorrection.

Reading novels is hard: read everything written in the 19th century.

Shakespeare is tricky: apply Aristotelian notions of tragedy to his plays.

Poetry is obscure: grasp the sublime at age 14.

And then it arrives: the moment you walk into a lesson, the learning objective of which is ‘to understand DAFOREST’. And you realise, with an almost imperceptible shrinking of your soul, that the game is up – so far up that you can no longer be sure it was ever grounded in the first place.

English languishes, a wilting flower in the arid landscape of pragmatism

So when our heads tell me that they are struggling to fill English teaching positions (particularly outside of London, where they are faced with an ever-dwindling pool of qualified candidates), I am sad – outraged, even – but I am not surprised.

Because universities are closing English departments at pace. Last month, Canterbury Christ Church University announced the closure of its English department. Let that sink in: Canterbury. We have a crisis on our hands.

Eighteen-year-olds are not choosing to study English for one of two reasons. Either we haven’t taught them that to spend three years reading is a privilege and an investment, or we have taught them to consider reading a burden and a cost.

And it gets worse. I don’t read The Spectator for obvious reasons, but I do listen to what Daisy Christodoulou has to say, for equally obvious reasons. So when she writes in The Spectator, I have someone read it to me for increasingly obvious reasons.

And when, as she does in an article titled ‘The fall of English‘, she tells us that we have an even bigger problem persuading 16-year-olds to study English, we have to ask ourselves honestly: if English was in the open bucket,would anyone pick it?

A generation ago, English literature A Level was a staple, a badge of honour for the intellectually curious. Now, it languishes, a wilting flower in the arid landscape of pragmatism and ‘future-proof’ skills.

My first job out of university armed with only an English degree was in finance. How many of our young people realise this is a possibility?

And who suffers most? Those from disadvantaged backgrounds, those without the cultural capital to compensate for a system that has abandoned the pursuit of eloquence.

Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens are not just dusty relics of a bygone era; they are portals to empathy, to understanding the human condition, to developing the very skills that employers claim to crave.

We are thinking hard about this at Future Academies. We don’t have the answers, and we are not here to prophesise. But we are making a bet.

Our bet is that English matters and that we need to start making the case that it might matter more than most. Stay tuned: something wicked this way comes.