By Antony Nichola, Goffs-Churchgate Academy
May 2020 was a defining moment for the world: the injustice of George Floyd’s death precipitated protests across the world for racial inequalities at the core of society, inequalities that rested in the very institutions that were supposed to underpin social justice.
It was a period where many realised – somewhat belatedly – that the world was a changed place. The education system woke up and rallied; many of us mobilised defiantly aiming to tackle issues around diversity.
The state of introspection that was required before such changes took place was, however, an uncomfortable position – we had to search deep to know if we were complicit in the institutional racism that was endemic in society.
For me, it was an embarrassing moment when, as the Head of English, I reflected on our own KS3 curriculum and found the books we used to educate the next generation had a common trend:
- The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – white male author.
- Private Peaceful – white male author.
- Alice in Wonderland – white male author.
- Of Mice and Men – white male author.
- Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – white male author (of course).
The list goes on.
Most of our schemes of work came from working with other schools or adapting them from educational establishments, which highlights that the problem was not only within our own English department.
It is no coincidence that AQA themselves recently announced changes to their GCSE syllabus, with options now including Chinonyerem Odimba’s Princess & The Hustler, Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking and Kit de Waal’s My Name is Leon after criticism about their lack of diversity.
As educators, we want to stand at the fore and change the lives of children, but to do so we must recognise the problems first. Inequality by exclusion and marginalisation has been rife in education, and it took those tragic events of May 2020 to slowly turn the wheel. It is now our job to make sure it keeps spinning by making changes to ensure all students are being seen, represented, and celebrated.
At the heart of English is reading
One of the challenges was ensuring this new forward-thinking curriculum reflected a wide range of groups. With this, came our ‘eureka’ moment. The solution was simple: read more books. We did not have to take the typical approach of teaching two, maybe three, books in a year. Why not teach a new book every half term?
The national curriculum is not meant to inhibit us. The requisite to include creative writing does not preclude us from reading while we sharpen our students’ skills in writing. It simply means that when we do a creative writing unit, we do it at the same time as reading a book. After all, what better source of inspiration is there for a student’s creative writing than the work of a published author?
Books like A Kind of Spark give our children inspiration to write, but at the same time gives them the cultural capital to understand the world for the perspective of somebody who is neurodivergent. For non-fiction, we study David Olusoga’s Black and British. For poetry, we read from the anthology collection She is Fierce in conjunction with exploring concepts of feminism. Every book was chosen to either enhance our students’ worldview or make them feel seen as individuals.
A brave new curriculum
In order to succeed in our vision, this project had to be treated as more than a token tick job. It required a vision and boldness for our English curriculum – a complete revamp was required.
Getting buy-in from teachers was an important first step, but it was not a difficult one. An open meeting about how best to address diversity was met with enthusiasm despite the extra work that would be required. We were galvanised to make progressive changes, and once the issue was laid bare for all to see, the actual decision to rewrite the entire KS3 schemes of work came from the teachers themselves. We are a small community school, so each teacher agreed to take on three to four schemes of work each, but it was this feeling that they were driving the changes which was crucial to the buy-in.
Once an agreement was in place, mapping the project became the next hurdle. In collaboration with a senior leader link, I put together a series of documents. This included a reading journey which provided the ambition and vision of the project. Our curriculum intent and learning journey was to cross-reference a full coverage of skills against the national curriculum, but then went above and beyond – a sort of ‘national curriculum plus’ model. The assessment outline ensured that every book was mapped against assessment objectives so that, regardless of their class, all students would practise the necessary skills in English and receive formative feedback.
The new schemes of work would need consistency within them, but I did not want to micromanage teachers. Our headteacher granted us a whole day off-timetable so we could conduct a thorough department briefing of the project. Here, we thrashed out our principles for the schemes of work as a group: we all agreed to use the same system of scaffolds to help students structure their responses; we agreed to include Challenge boxes in all PowerPoints to provide alternative stretch tasks and Stuck boxes to provide support; we decided we would have a Free Writing Friday every fortnight to address concerns about a lack of extended writing with the extra emphasis on reading.
As a result of this careful pre-planning, it meant that 18 months later, we had a new KS3 curriculum that would do justice to that vision we had at the very beginning of our journey. The extra £12,000 budget for new books could have been prohibitive, but our senior leadership team shared this vision of inclusivity and were quick to grant the fund. Now, I can proudly say, that by the time all our children reach the age of 16, they have all read a minimum of twenty books while they have been with us. Twenty books that have educated them about the world, twenty books that has given them a view of the world in all its wide and varied glory. Twenty books where, hopefully, every single one of our students might recognise a little bit of themselves in the author or the characters and feel empowered.
And the beauty of it all, the key ingredient for success, was that we simply had to read more books.
