Dropping poetry from GCSEs is a crying shame

Just when you think it’s not actually possible for the Government to get things worse when it comes to schools and Covid, along comes Ofqual to make a fool of you by proving that yes, it is indeed possible for them to make an even bigger mess of things. Today we found out that it will be possible for GCSE students next year to do English literature without any poetry.

Ofqual, under its head, Sally Collier, consulted schools about whether they felt able to offer the same subjects as normal; not wholly surprisingly they said they didn’t…apparently they expressed ‘significant concern’ about their ability to cover all the subject areas. Well, knock me down with a girder.

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David Butterfield

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So teachers can drop either poetry or the nineteenth century novel or fiction and drama after 1914.