Malorje Blackman GCSE

I am a teacher and work in a school library as well, I also love Malorie Blackman. I too was surprised by Boys don t Cry, but be fair OP it is better than the festival of misery that is Of Mice and Men.
And there is an issue with a lot of young adult fiction being quite easy to read, this to do with writers and publishers wanting to appeal to such a wide audience.

@MarchingFrogs
I agree! The travel ones and Toast by Nigel Slater spring to mind! However as a general genre, they are not literary heavyweights in terms of painting pictures and use of language or even delving into challenging social issues. It does demonstrate the difference between a masters and GCSE though!

Given that the term 'cookery book' covers a huge range of types, from a simple collection of 'things based on chicken' / 'puddings' etc to what is mainly a travel journal / social history of a geographical area with a few representative recipes tucked in somewhere within the text, there may well be scope for it at the latter end, at least?

Would you add those to the list of books for gcse study?

You can study almost any written word in a literary sense. I did my masters thesis on cookbooks so know how deep you can dive to pull information from a text.

I think that Ofsted don’t say they want the same curriculum for all. They use the word “appropriate”. This covers content, structure, coverage and sequencing” and “implemented it effectively”. This is in the handbook. Therefore you don’t have to teach the same to all if it’s not appropriate to do so. You do
have to justify decisions though. That’s reasonable.,

It isn't what Ofsted want to see, in my recent experience. You do need to explain and justify your curriculum, and I'd expect some questioning around why different groups were doing different texts and how that works within the whole, but that's reasonable I think.

When I started teaching English 15 years ago, at GCSE level there was some scope to choose which coursework tasks and literature texts we did. Now we all teach exactly the same lessons never mind texts, as this is what Ofsted reportedly want to see....

Bit late to this thread, but we’re on holiday with friends. Their daughter (going into Year 10) is lying on the beach reading Purple Hibiscus. It’s one of her GCSE texts and she is loving it. Seems like a good option to me.

It's a potent mix of all of those things, in my experience.

Inexperienced hods need easy wins with SLT.
Inexperienced staff often want to teach what they were taught.
I know teachers teach best when they're passionate and students get more out of it.
I've been HoD and trained teachers.

This is what I struggle with. I know teaching is hard in many many ways, but why would heads of department make things harder for their own staff and get less good results?

It must be that risk taking isn't being encouraged/rewarded. Or that the 'wrong' people are being promoted. or it makes revision classes harder to organise? Or maybe that too many parents complain if their child then ends up with the 'wrong' text and no one wants to tell them to shut up or spend time justifying it?

Generally if what you are doing is sensible and justifiable then it should be OK. I do sometimes wonder how many of these hoops schools complain they have to jump through for Ofsted are imaginary.

You would think so but " should be ok" is not how it works in my experience. Sadly not imaginary but that's a whole new thread.

I suspect a lot are imaginary. But putting oneself in the firing line of disciplinary by refusing to teach AIC because lord of the flies consistently gets better marks is not a thing worth doing, frankly.
It's a wholly depressing state of affairs. Next, they'll come for the a level texts. Po

We teach in a world in which - apparently - if ofsted cross the corridor from my room to yours, and we're not doing the same thing, ALL HELL WILL BREAK LOOSE.

In a previous life pre-children and a different discipline (SW development) I had to regularly fight more senior management who thought we needed to do illogical things just to meet outside standards (ISO9000 and other things). It drove me crazy (as the person trying to get us to the standard).

Generally if what you are doing is sensible and justifiable then it should be OK. I do sometimes wonder how many of these hoops schools complain they have to jump through for Ofsted are imaginary.

@BeanieTeen
So you don’t think there are brighter children who can engage in more complex thoughts and language? Everyone is identikit? Not sure why anyone gets a grade 3 then? It’s reasonable to tailor lessons and books to ability. My DDs read Malorie Blackman at around 12/13. She visited the school. I didn’t like George Eliot by the way. At least she was a women though!

Bringing back bad memories of my English Lit O level in 1984.
Book - The Trumpet Major
Play - Henry IV part one
Poems - First world war poets

I was an avid reader, a bookworm from age 4 onwards ( I taught myself to read). But my goodness I hated those O lvel texts!
I'm not saying they weren't "worthy" reads, but they did nothing for me.

It doesn't matter if Bali Rai is fabulous if Bali Rai isn't on the exam though

I read Bali Rai's (sorry about sp.) earliest books and thought they were very good. I think since then he's been Carnegie nominated and long listed. I know he engages really well with schools in school visits.

Are those on the spec!?

Bali Rai is in no way superior to MB.

I agree with you.
I would suggest to the school Catherine Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Candy Gourlay, possibly A M Dassu, Bali Rae.

Ha ha. Hilarious. The texts are obviously great- but the kids are unlikely to have the emotional intelligence to understand them. This is ridiculously 'private school'.

It sounds so 'impressive', I'm wondering what the objectives were? Where the curriculum balance was, and what the teacher's qualifications were? It sounds like something done by an insecure teacher with a PhD, but no teaching qualification. To teach those texts properly you're looking at spending most of the year on them.....

.....so where was the English Language teaching? Grammar? Non-fiction? Writing? The actual stuff on the national curriculum? Something was sacrificed somewhere!

Hi OP. Glad you've found the category it's in. I teach Edexcel, and am also an examiner.

Yes, it's up against An Inspector Calls- which makes it tricky. Around 90% of schools will teach that. I would actually say it's a very good sign that your child's school is doing something different, and one of the new choices. It's a sign of a good school- one where the teachers aren't stagnating and dying of boredom.

Please don't vote Tory. We're still really struggling with the restrictions on text choices. We're far, far more restricted than it looks because if you look at the Shakespeare and 19th century texts, you'll see that they're very very uneven too. Why would you teach a long text when teaching a shorter text allows your students more time for analysis? It means that, again, most schools (by a long way) choose the same texts. It's really not a choice at all.

I'm worried every time an education minister opens their mouth at the moment. It's Edexcel who our current Ed minister criticised for removing two poems (sigh) and changing them for something equally good by non-white poets.

The Malorie Blackman is fine. It's not the dream, but it is fine.

in English you would need to analyse complex language.
AO2 is not assessed in the question this text is for, though.

Love her books, read loads of them like pig heart boy and noughts and crosses when I was growing up. Wouldn't say they're exam worthy at that age though necessarily. Bit like Jacqueline Wilson. Fantastic coming of age books and introducing the big issues, but not exactly complex literary structure or words, which in English you would need to analyse complex language.

HT definitely not an English specialist 🤣