There is undeniably a gap between the difficulty of GCSE texts and the majority of teenagers’ reading ability. I want to ask why.  And what can we do about it?

Impenetrable literature

As much as I love Dickens and Shakespeare – and I do! – in my experience, many, many students struggle with them. Shakespeare, particularly, presents challenges of language as well as context. For the GCSE literature exam, however, students have two (or three) years to study, discuss and digest the language, ideas and characters they will be examined on. The language exam, however, presents students with nineteenth century texts which they have never seen before. The length of the sentences, the latinate vocabulary, the expected understanding of nineteenth century life all contribute to the difficulty of comprehending the texts.

Reading standards

Add to the mix the apparently falling standards of teenage reading and we can see exactly why students struggle.

A study done in 2018 by Renaissance UK (the company who provides the Accelerated Reading Scheme) shows that “Book difficulty drops off sharply in Year 7, with secondary students consistently reading behind their chronological age.”  If all you have been reading up to now is Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the latest David Walliams book, it will be highly challenging to jump to Wilkie Collins and Charlotte Bronte.

As quoted in a Huffington Post article, Professor Keith Topping of Dundee University, who carried out the research, said:

“To avert a further slide in literacy levels in secondary schools, pupils should be encouraged to push themselves to read more difficult books.

“By their teenage years pupils are more likely to take advice from their friends and peers than their teachers and parents about the types of books they should be reading.

“With this in mind, teachers could encourage them to talk more openly about what they are reading and make appropriate suggestions to their classmates.”

What does Professor Topping imagine teachers and librarians have been doing all of this time? If only such a simple and obvious suggestion was all that it would take to solve the problem.

Teenage Reading

As anyone who has a teenager or teaches them will know, there is always a resistance to anything that the establishment – their school, their parents, the government – want them to do. Lots of teenagers read.  Of course they do. I have had many lovely hours chatting about books with young people of all ages. But can we blame those who don’t? Who has time to read when they’re busy growing an adult brain, struggling with crushes and spots and agonising self-doubt, whilst experimenting with alternative cultures and lifestyles? (that’s sex, drugs and alcohol to us anxious parents).

But here, we are talking about people who can choose whether to read or not. The actual picture is not so simple.

To understand Dickens, Shakespeare and the like, someone will need (at least) a reading age of 16. Let’s not forget that a fair few of the students sit their GCSEs before they actually reach this age. There are barriers to reaching the needed standard other than your actual age . Those who speak a different language at home, those whose parents don’t have the means to offer them resources, books and experiences, those who don’t have the middle class cultural capital to understand many of the set texts, those who don’t have parental support, those who struggle for many reasons beyond their control through illness, mental health problems, family situations and so on. I am sure I have not covered half of the reasons why students might have problems reaching the impossibly high standards, but it is very often not through lack of intelligence, not through lack of hard work, but simply through circumstances of birth, environment, economics and society.

Closing the gap

I wonder whether we should reconsider the level we expect students to reach simply to pass their GCSE English. All I have been talking about so far is comprehension. As you know, students also have to evaluate, compare and analyse. The gap between their previous reading experience and that expected at GCSE grows ever wider. However, assuming this is the system we all have to live within, our responsibility as parents, as teachers, as librarians is to try and close that gap. How do we do it?

I have already written about how parents can help their children love to read, about how teachers can encourage reading in the classroom, and there are thousands of words written on the subject every day. As always there is no easy answer. To simplify, we need to close the poverty gap, fund education appropriately, and start prioritising reading at High School.  I know – it’s just wishing for the impossible. But if we focus on reading during Key Stage 3 (Year 7 to Year 9), then students wouldn’t suddenly find themselves lost as they begin Key Stage 4 (Year 10 to Year 11). Primary schools do a fantastic job of teaching our children to read. At Year 7, we put all that on the back-burner and hope the children have got the message.  They haven’t.

I hope all that wasn’t too controversial and opinionated. After all, what do I know?  I just see the results of this reading gap and the upset and misery it causes. If there was an easy solution, all those amazing teachers and librarians would have found it by now. As it always does, it just comes back to reading.