Many teachers have no grounding in grammar or English language and are woefully ignorant of classic literature, the president of a body that represents leading independent girls’ schools has said in a newspaper article today.
Alice Phillips, who is head of the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA), says that some enthusiastic teachers are “completely at sea” with many aspects of proper usage of language.
“Some of our brightest English literature teachers are, frankly, unversed in much pre-20th century literature,” Ms Phillips writes.
Of her school, St Catherine’s in Bramley, Surrey, she says: “Many of our brightest, most enthusiastic teachers have little or no grounding in English language or grammar, through no fault of their own, and are completely at sea with many aspects of proper usage.
In the Times Educational Supplement article Ms Phillips writes: “Wide reading and a familiarity with formal expression and grammar work to a certain extent, but won’t help you in front of a class of 14-year-olds when you are tasked with delving into the mysteries of subordinate clauses.
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“We put in place an English grammar course for our Year 7 intake, after identifying a cross-curricular need for this in native, modern and classical languages. It has paid huge dividends.
“Some of our younger teachers have not been taught English grammar in the 1990s and 2000s, when they were at school themselves, and consequently they feel less confident as they teach as relatively new learners themselves.”
Ms Phillips says many younger teachers are unfamiliar with aspects of the new GCSE English curriculum, which requires a Shakespeare play, a 19th-century novel, poetry since 1789, and fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards.
“How are we to bridge the confidence gap?” she asks. “I hasten to add that I believe that they are more than equal to these challenges. They just haven’t been tasked with them before.”
Ms Phillips welcomes the return to rigour, but questions whether there are enough rigorously educated teachers. She says that only her father saved her from the same fate, by preparing her for her Oxford entrance exam with a “robust understanding of grammar for French and Latin”.
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Ms Phillips adds: “How are we to deliver the vision of breadth that is implicit in the new guidelines, at the same time as enabling teachers to teach a broader range of texts with confidence?
“If you’re not already intimately acquainted with the tremendous breadth the 19th-century novel has to offer — Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens and Charlotte and Emily Brontë and so on, the understandable default will be to bone up on two or three texts and stick to them.
“This is not at all in the spirit of the new curriculum, nor will it be permissible. If we are to teach meaty literature with the real passion and confidence it warrants, and enjoy doing it, we will need English teachers who don’t just view Shakespeare as the only pre-1900 writer with whom they feel confident.”
She adds: “Teachers all over the country are signing up for hastily arranged training courses in the new curricula and burning the midnight oil to prepare themselves. That they strive to be prepared is good — and so typical of so many of the teachers I work alongside — but it is not enough.”
Ms Phillips said that the government should start a public relations campaign aimed at 17-year-olds to persuade them to join the teaching profession.