English is in crisis. And no, not the sort of crisis caused by signs in supermarkets saying ‘ten items or less’. It’s caused by students hating their GCSE English Language lessons and refusing to continue the subject at A-level. A-level take-up has dropped by 40 per cent since 2012. You might giggle that this just throttles the supply of mournful Yeats-quoting burger-flippers but I think it’s a concern. There are all sorts of reasons that it’s worth studying English and only some of them are being able to quote Yeats.
A very large number of young gamers engage voluntarily with text related to the games they love
In response to this crisis, there seems to be consensus among teachers that GCSEs need to change. A report for the OCR exam board last month, endorsed by the former Education Secretary Charles Clarke, called for a radical overhaul of the curriculum. Now an umbrella group of experts, the Common English Forum (CEF), has offered a modest proposal for how to go about it.
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