In preparation for his new book Forget School, Martin Illingworth spent two years interviewing young people about their education and hopes for the future. Here, he suggests how English as a subject might adapt to meet their needs.

Just before we knew about the coronavirus and lockdowns came to Britain, I wrote, in my new book Forget School (Independent Thinking Press, 2020), about the way the young were setting up businesses for themselves in the adult world:

‘Everywhere you look the beardy hipster culture is winning: start-up companies that are tech savvy and service orientated, independent retail stores offering vinyl and shabby chic clothing, street food vendors with dirty vegan junk food, retro everything, designer branding, graffitied art and grapefruit pale ale. The music scene is alive with open mic nights and the spoken word scene is buzzing with politics and self-expression. The revolution is urban and located in refurbished industrial buildings. The revolution is plastic-free and risk-aware. The revolution is bisexual, gender fluid and free to be what it wants. The revolution is made of celebrations, launch nights and after-parties. What a time to be young! And all of this is done with a social conscience that is all about the environment, about small local business togetherness and changing the world one individual at a time. It is an economically viable dropout!‘

If 18-to-24-year-olds had been the only people to vote in the last general election, there would now be no conservative MPs at all. There would also be no departure from Europe. Our young have noted that they’re going to be renters because the adult world won’t let them have an affordable mortgage. This has changed how they view money, savings and investment. Young people think more short term with their finances. They also think more local, more supportive and more collaboratively. They are wary of the competence of adults because of the mess the world is in and the lack of understanding adults show when it comes to the digital world. For the young, when they turn to an expert it tends to be someone their own age who is good at what they do and often has a YouTube video. Our seeming unwillingness to let the young join in with the adult world means that the generation gap is as wide as it has ever been and is getting wider.

I have spent much of the past couple of years interviewing young people (between the ages of twenty and thirty) asking them to reflect on their school years. What was good about school? What was bad about school? What have they had to learn for themselves after school?

The young people I spoke to were mainly self-employed (the fastest growing sector of the job market) or holding down a paid day job whilst they worked on what they really wanted to be. Only one or two of my interviewees were what you might call disaffected with their schooling experience. Most came away with GCSEs, with A Levels and with university degrees that said they were capable. Often, however, when they got out into the adult world they found that they were lacking skills that we might easily have developed with them during their time in school if we could make a curriculum that served them well.

The future of English?

So what have I learnt from these conversations and how might the insights of these young people support us in reflecting on what they really need from an English subject curriculum? In what ways can the subject of English look to the future? Here are some of my findings.

Digital proficiency

We absolutely need to teach digital proficiency; this is how we actually communicate. There is no adult world waiting for people who can write with paper and pen. If our young people are to thrive in the modern world, they must become digitally proficient. Our young people need a new articulacy that will support them to join in with the real world of adult communication. The way that we communicate is changing and being re-invented faster than we can keep up with. We are going to have to learn, unlearn and re-learn constantly as the means of communication become faster, more efficient and the norm. Soon, for example, we will be ‘writing’ by speaking to AI devices and then asking them to organise the SP&G for us. The new notion of grammar will be about where you want the text and images on the screen and when you want the soundtrack to come in. Traditional notions of grammar teaching are on a very limited lifespan. Employers today would much rather see an e-portfolio of what a potential employee has and can achieve than know that they got a grade 5 in a GCSE.

Critical literacy

The ability to read with a critical eye has never been so important. Information, once the domain of schools and libraries, has become more or less democratically accessible. Children have huge storage devices of information in their back pockets. Those disadvantaged children who do not have access to AI devices and the wealth of experiences to be gained from internet access are going to fall even further behind. We need to support all of our children in being shrewd and sceptical in approaching this mass of data. Presence of mind, the capacity to deal with whatever challenges life throws at you, is surely a central aim of a good modern education. It is increasingly impossible for teachers to know what children need to know in their adult lives so we must teach them a healthy awareness of how to weigh up situations and make judgement calls.

Confidence and creativity

Perhaps the most disheartening pattern of responses from my interviewees was the general reflection that they had to learn to be confident after they left school. Can we explicitly write into schemes of work where, when and how we are going to concentrate on developing confidence? The ability to develop confidence had impact on so many areas of my interviewees’ lives – happiness, relationships and networking to name but a few. You don’t develop this sense of confidence sitting passively, guessing what the teacher thinks is the right answer or being trained to write paragraphs for an exam answer that is two years away. Confidence is developed through the chance to make decisions and in being creative. Confidence is gained through having the opportunities to develop your talents, sometimes making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

Questions with no ‘right’ answers end up having loads of answers and they teach the sorts of creative and lateral thinking that my young entrepreneurs said they needed to be able to do to get ahead in business. Teachers are often suspicious that group work takes time away from imparting knowledge. However, group work is crucial in offering the opportunity to see how other people operate and find out about the ways in are going to operate in collaborative situations.

Contemporary texts

Another way that we can develop confidence in our English pupils is to offer them a more vibrant and contemporary range of reading, both collectively in-class and as a part of our exam syllabuses: books that represent their lived experiences. We need to decolonise the curriculum and offer a range of authors that includes a greater ethnic diversity and includes much younger writers (preferably alive) and many more female writers. All children deserve to be studying writers that look like them and talk about their lives. This will surely empower them to feel like they too have the potential to be strong communicators.

Students as writers for real audiences

The intense focus on how writers write and the ‘AF2’ language, structure and form requirements have created a sense of a professional class of people known as writers. Unfortunately, this does not seem to include the children. We need to support students to consider themselves as writers rather than as passive observers. Can we get our pupils writing for real purposes that have real audiences in real contexts? The young people that I spoke to indicated that a real audience and a real purpose are real motivational drivers and a sure-fire way to get children to produce their ‘best’ writing. With the best will in the world, the English teacher is not a real audience. Interviewing your grandad about the best day of his life and then writing a story with grandad as the main character and then giving the story to him is a real audience and purpose.

Reading for pleasure

In truth our young people both read and write far more than the generations that preceded them through school. The notion that kids don’t read anymore is just not true. In saying that kids don’t read, people are generally thinking about the reading of novels, a staple of past generations. Today, reading a book has so much competition when it comes to the instinctive urge to create and enjoy narratives. Our young can binge on Netflix, interact with Facebook and the like, play FIFA and Fortnite and text message their friends: so many more enticing and immediate ways of sharing stories. Our teaching of the novel needs to be more engaging than ever if the act of studying in the classroom is to develop a lifelong and fulfilling pursuit of reading for pleasure.

English for life, not exams

The pressure felt by schools to get pupils to pass exams often has the impact of narrowing the English curriculum and our young people have lost respect for these exams that they have undertaken. They understand the limits of the value of remembering things in high pressure situations. For well over a generation now, teachers have been ‘gaming’ the system of exams with the pupils. We tell them that ‘it’s important, it’s for the exam’. This, of course, suggests that whatever you are doing is really unimportant, finished with once the exam is over. Surely we should be explaining the value that the work undertaken in our classrooms has for the lives of our pupils.

And finally …

An English curriculum needs to aim to show children the joy of their lives today and imbue them with hope for the future. An education gained at school can no longer last a lifetime but it can aim to provide children with the skills and understanding so that they can join in with wherever we are headed. How we read, write, speak and listen is changing, but they remain central in these aims.