A Response to David Didau’s Response to my TES Piece April 2025

Thank you for responding to my TES piece in an open and thoughtful way. I'm glad you agree with so much of what I say. It is a bit of a surprise, as you suggest in your piece, but it’s a very welcome change.

Where you disagree is over the idea that there was once a kind of English teaching that both lit the spark for students AND was rigorous in developing student knowledge. You say,

We run on vibes and the half-remembered moments of joy we sometimes experienced as students.

And you describe English teaching in the 1990s in this way:

…the fashion was to teach children creativity and empathy. We’d read young adult novels and ask, ‘How do you think the characters feel? How would you feel in that situation?’ Then we’d ask students to write letters to the characters expressing these feelings, or compose a diary entry from different characters’ perspectives where they reveal their reactions to events. Other stuff – like sentence structure – we assumed children would just pick up if they read enough young adult novels and wrote enough diary entries.  

And you conclude with:

What they absolutely do not need is for us to fool ourselves into thinking it was better back in some mythical version of the past and then to recreate mistakes we should commit to never making again.

I’d like to respond to these suggestions here.

Your experience may well have been as you describe when you trained in 1990s, and perhaps for some others too. Undoubtedly there were some classrooms where assumptions were made that certain skills and knowledge would just ‘happen’ rather than being taught, and perhaps, for some teachers, an over-emphasis on empathy, or on loose tasks with no clear rationale. But prior to the 1990s, during the 1990s and also beyond, this was certainly not the experience of all – or perhaps even most – English teachers. At EMC, we have engaged with English teachers and departments since the late 1970s till now, so we’re in an excellent position to look historically at change in the teaching of the subject. During the 1990s, as now, we were thriving – meeting large numbers of teachers, running by far the largest programme of English and Media CPD in the country and producing publications that were very well received and well used.

In 1995, EMC published ‘Klondyke Kate & Other Non-Fiction Texts’. This was both an ERA award-winning publication and an EMC bestseller. It was taught in schools up & down the country. I devised some of the units for my GCSE re-sit students when I was Head of English at Islington Sixth Form Centre. Our re-sit students bucked the trends, achieving really excellent results. Teachers more generally reported how much they and their students loved ‘Klondyke Kate’, not because it taught them ‘empathy’ or ‘creativity’ (though hopefully along the way it did that too) but rather because it taught them so much about high quality non-fiction texts, about genres, writing styles, authorial perspectives and how to think in more sophisticated ways about their own writing. Texts ranged from Pliny on Vesuvius, a Bill Bryson chapter from ‘The Lost Continent’, John Pilger, Samuel Johnson, Primo Levi, Angela Carter, Paul Theroux, Blake Morrison, Sir Walter Raleigh and Maya Angelou.

Our ‘EMC KS3 Units’ publication was also published in 1997. It too was very popular and many of the units formed part of our well-attended CPD, where we teased out principles and aspects of pedagogy – which included above all how to challenge students of all abilities to develop their reading and writing in ways that were enjoyable, inclusive and demanding. Is it possible that you were unaware of all of this, and the way in which so many English teachers were using texts like this, and resources of their own, to do a whole lot more than just ask students to write letters in the voices of characters, or say how they felt about texts?

If you look through these two publications, you’ll see a vast amount of literary knowledge, close textual analysis & careful developmental work on student writing, as well as work on aspects of writing, the nature of narrative, standard English and more. The level of challenge is, in my view, significantly  higher than in much of what one sees now e.g. a unit on spelling for KS3 looks at versions of the King James Bible among other texts to explore the history of the spelling system.

Looking back at the material in both of these popular 1990s resources, the lesson ideas and resources also look like a lot of fun for students – very varied writing & reading, with invitations to make meaningful texts themselves & develop them through planning, discussion and re-drafting – but with a high level of conceptual understanding expected along the way & plenty of work on grammar, vocabulary and style woven in. There is a strong connection between reading what writers do, and thinking about those writers’ choices in relation to their own writing.

Teachers taught a whole lot more than just YA novels too. It’s a misrepresentation to suggest otherwise. We ran full, repeated courses on Great Expectations for KS3 and KS4, ‘Teaching Big Books’, poetry at KS3 and 4, language knowledge at KS3, grammar at KS3, teaching Shakespeare. I was a particular fan (in my own teaching and my CPD) of ‘reading trails’, units which developed ‘conversations’ between texts across time and traditions. My Wordsworth reading trail, in ‘The Poetry Pack’ was something that teachers constantly mentioned when I met them, saying ‘My students love this!’ It encompassed texts by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Gillian Clarke, a few other modern poets and a Heinneken advert.

This work and the work of many English teachers (and PGCE students in many university-based ITT courses led by brilliant tutors like Gabrielle Cliff-Hodges at Cambridge, Anne Turvey at IoE, Debra Myhill at Exeter, Sue Dymoke, Sue Brindley etc) was both rigorous & engaging.  Clearly, you could not say this was so, everywhere. Clearly, not for everyone. Clearly not for you.  But I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that because you and some others were not able to engage with, or perhaps in some cases chose not to engage with, this kind of work in your early careers, that it wasn’t happening and is a romantic, nostalgic illusion. It was happening. It definitely was. And it explains, in part, why so many teachers from that period and before feel so downhearted by current trends and have considered leaving, or have left the classroom.

My TES piece was a very short one – cut down in the editing process by almost half. So I couldn’t say everything, nor could I fully argue the case. You’re absolutely right, I don’t mention GCSE English Language as one very important factor in damaging the subject. I wholly agree with you about pointing the finger at this as a major problem. Like you, and so many others, I think it needs urgent reform to allow the subject to blossom again, as it once did, for many, at KS3.