Carnegie-nominated author and English teacher Nicola Garrard reflects on her secondary school author visit tour and explores how authentic working class representation in YA fiction can support English teachers to strengthen critical literacy

For many students, English is where they first encounter sustained discussion of power, voice and inequality. Yet at precisely the point when reading for pleasure often declines, too many students are asked to engage with texts that feel remote from their lived realities. This matters because disengagement from reading shapes how young people interpret the world, whose stories they trust and how vulnerable they may be to simplistic or extremist narratives.

Recent flag protests and the rise in support for the far right have exposed how communities facing economic hardship can be manipulated by disinformation, racial scapegoating and dog-whistle politics. These are not abstract issues for secondary school classrooms. Teenagers encounter such narratives daily online, often without the tools to interrogate them critically. English lessons – through literature, discussion and writing — can offer those tools.

During this academic year, my school author visits have explored the history of protest movements and extremism alongside my novel On the Edge. We discuss Meibion Glyndŵr, a radical Welsh group active in the 1980s, whose campaign of burning holiday homes was driven by frustrations that remain recognisable today: insecure housing, community displacement and economic inequality. Framing this history as narrative — with motives, consequences and moral ambiguity — allows students to analyse how anger can be mobilised, and to question where protest tips into harm.

It’s not difficult for students to imagine how a similar protest movement might re-emerge in modern Britain. In January 2026, during freezing temperatures, hundreds of residents went without gas in and around Salcombe in Devon, where 45.3% of housing is comprised of second homes. Essential services could not be restored until absentee owners were contacted and granted access to their properties. For 11-16 readers, this kind of contemporary context makes abstract ideas about inequality tangible and debatable, and complements cross-curricular discussions on the costs and benefits of tourism.

On the Edge is rooted in my own childhood in South Devon, where the landscape attracts tourists but rural poverty is compounded by insecure work, limited transport and restricted opportunities for young people. The novel asks how teenagers make sense of such inequalities and shows how desperation can be exploited when working class voices are ignored.

The story follows seventeen-year-old Rhys, who looks after his younger brothers while their father works long hours as a lorry driver. Surfing offers Rhys joy and identity, but when the rural housing crisis threatens to push his family inland, the looming possibility of homelessness leaves him vulnerable to Dodo, a charismatic activist who channels legitimate anger into extremism. For students, Rhys’s journey opens up discussion about agency, responsibility and manipulation.

Young people’s concerns about social inequality, the climate crisis and identity are real, but they don’t always surface as articulate debate. They can appear as apathy, cynicism or withdrawal. My author talks and classroom work create space to explore far-right nationalism, St George’s Cross graffiti and online disinformation, while also asking students how anger might be transformed into constructive action. We look at real-world community projects and volunteering, linking historical and sociological analysis to engagement.

For the hundreds of thousands of students growing up in poverty — and those whose ‘just coping’ families juggle multiple low-paid jobs — reading can feel like entering a world that does not expect them to exist. Working class teenagers remain significantly underrepresented in contemporary YA fiction. When they do appear, they are often reduced to familiar tropes, where class becomes a character trait: the troubled boy, the antagonist, the gritty victim. Deprivation is foregrounded, but community resilience, humour and mutual support are sidelined.

This lack of representation affects engagement. If reading rarely reflects students’ realities, it can feel irrelevant, particularly under the pressures of Key Stage 4. Authenticity does not mean sanitising hardship or romanticising struggle. It means portraying working class lives with nuance, agency and hope. When students encounter characters navigating challenges similar to their own, reading becomes validating.

Reading for pleasure flourishes when students feel emotionally and culturally connected to a text — something counsellors call congruence. Teaching authentic novels about working class lives, like On the Edge, in rural secondary schools generates lively, thoughtful discussion. Creative writing responses, alongside mapping the psychogeography of students’ own areas, allow them to explore voice, setting and identity — core English skills — while affirming that their experiences are worth writing about.

An English department reflective audit for working class representation

• How many texts on your Key Stage 4 curriculum or in your school library are written by working class authors or centre working class lives?
  
• Do your recommended reading lists include working class YA writers such as Natasha Carthew, Ashley Hickson Lovence, Anthony McGowan, Phil Earle, Patrice Lawrence or Brian Conaghan?
  
• Has your school invited a working class author to speak to students as part of World Book Day or other RfP initiatives?
  
• When creative or extracurricular opportunities arise, how are PP and low-income students actively supported to participate?
  

In the National Year of Reading 2026, students deserve books that reflect their lives and invite them into national conversations as stakeholders. When English teachers foreground authentic, nuanced working class stories, they do more than improve engagement: they equip young people to read critically, resist manipulation and recognise the value of their own voices. In this way, fiction becomes not an escape from reality, but a means of understanding and shaping it.

Featured image: iStock/coldsnowstorm