Hi my name is Hayley Andrews and I'm Head of English at Turing House School which is
part of the Russell Education Trust. Our school was established in 2015 and I joined just
a year later when we only had two year groups so it's been interesting to be building an
english curriculum from scratch. Our school was named after Alan Turing, the famous World
War 2 code breaker and I think that was a really deliberate choice with the name. I
think that name celebrates possibility and potential but of course it carries a really
important message of inclusiveness and advocating for equal treatment for all. Our school is
in quite an affluent area and while we do have population of Black, Asian and Minority
Ethnic students, they are a minority. I think it's really important to ensure that our curriculum
matches the rich and diverse society that we live in. I first started thinking about
diversity in our English curriculum when teaching To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men
to our Year 9 students. Of Mice and Men was such a popular text that when it was removed
from the GCSE syllabus many schools all over the country wanted to keep it, so moved it
down to Year 9. Whether that was because we felt it was worth keeping, or just because
we all had a stock cupboard full of it. We love this text, and I taught it before in
a previous school as well. And while I can't deny that students respond really well to
it, I found myself feeling uncomfortable teaching it. This all comes down to personal opinion
and others may disagree, but I was conscious that the only BAME narratives that we were
teaching students presented the Black victim in both of those texts and with Mockingbird,
we also had something of the white saviour narrative, not to mention the problem with
the language. We felt increasingly uncomfortable having the n-word spoken in classrooms and
while we of course adapted this to make sure we no longer had that, we still came to the
decision that that wasn't enough and there were other texts out there that we could teach
Year 9. So as a school we're making moves this year to remove those texts from our curriculum
and we've already chosen Benjamin Zephaniah's 'Face' to replace Of Mice and Men. I think
Face is going to be a great choice for us because the theme of appearance will be really
interesting to explore with our students who are you know all over apps like Snapchat and
Tiktok and I think it's something - I think appearance is something that many teenagers
feel quite strongly about and can relate to. We also think that they'll respond really
warmly to Zephaniah's writing. With the introduction of the new GCSE in 2015, when I would tell
students and parents about our GCSE Literature texts, I felt uncomfortable that every single
text we taught was written by a dead white man. With the exception of a few poems of
course. So we were really pleased when Edexcel added in the diverse text choices for GCSE.
We chose to teach Malorie Blackman's 'Boys Don't Cry' because it is such a captivating
story and it really engaged our students, here it is. So for those of you who don't
know, the book is about a boy a seventeen year old boy whose ex-girlfriend turns up
one day and tells him he's a father and not only that, she then leaves the baby with him
and then disappears. So what student wouldn't want to read that? For us it works really
well with the lower ability classes who we were keen to re-engage in English and foster
in them an enjoyment and appreciation of literature. I can remember one of my students saying 'Miss,
I can't believe we're allowed to study this book at GCSE', I think they engaged with the
edgy, contemporary issues it raised about life for teenagers today. It always challenging
to change texts, when you have a text that works and at GCSE especially when you have
a text that gets good results, there's also a budget to think about as well as the challenge
of bringing a whole department along with change and creating extra workload for staff.
We also had the extra challenge of being amongst the first few schools to teach Boys Don't
Cry so there were few materials available for us. But luckily Edexcel were great and
they provided webinars and resources to really help and guide our planning and teaching.
And they've also now published exemplar questions and responses which helps us feel more confident
that we're teaching the right things. There's clearly a growing national movement and rightly
so, towards ensuring schools teach a more diverse curriculum. So I think in a few years
time there will be almost as many resources for Boys Don't Cry and the other diverse text
choices as there are for any other core text at GCSE. As teachers pick up on these new
texts and share ideas as we always do. So to finish I'd like to share some things that
my students have told me about reading Boys Don't Cry. One student said 'I enjoyed this
book because it's modern and it's a really good story' and another said 'it's really
relevant and you can relate to the characters.' And finally, we have one Year 10 student who
really struggles to engage in any learning and he rarely takes part in lessons or even
puts pen to paper, we gave him a copy of the book and he came running in one Monday morning
saying how he read the entire thing in a weekend and how much he loved it. I think that says
it all.