They’re still teaching the same books they did when I was at school

[Rapidmama]

DD massively dismayed to see Macbeth on her reading list. She utterly loathed it in year 7.

An inspector calls....I did that for GCSE 20 years ago

Animal Farm - not so bad but done to death by now surely?

Why can’t they inject some life into the reading syllabus?

I'm starting to feel better about ours, the merchant if Venice, the importance of being earnest and then best of all my family and other animals

Gove did indeed say that. One of the reasons we loathed him as Education Sec.

To the poster that said about 21st Century Lit not being there- DNA was released in 2007/8/9 I think? So there are some. We also do have some variety at KS3. Michael Morpurgo is my favourite YA writer and I teach lots of his stuff 👍

Your dd’s school is at fault for covering gcse texts pre-GCSEs. What’s the point? The school know they will have to do Macbeth in Year 10, so why study it in Year 7? Madness.

They’d be much better studying other books pre-Year 9. They have much more freedom then!

So don’t blame the government for the curriculum...

Macbeth is fabulous. Sure, it’s hard to access. But the themes - ambition, love, power, guilt, murder - are timeless!

Also, Stevenson - great. Ties in with the historical background of the book - Victorian Edinburgh and the dichotomy between good and evil.

An Inspector Calls - haven’t read it but my dd has enjoyed it.

Animal Farm? A classic. Especially with the way the world is going.

The Harry Potter books are NOT great literature and have no place on a GCSE course.

Hunger Games? Aimed at too young an audience. Kids will have read them before GCSEs.

I think your school is to blame.

While I do think it's rubbish that she's having to do the same text twice, she's going to be able to get a lot more and different things out of Macbeth at 14 than at 11, and I think you should be at least trying to encourage her to consider it with that in mind

At our school the main reason we did the same texts again and again was financial. The school had copies of Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, The Great Gatsby etc and so that's what we read. We didn't repeat the texts though - it was set up so you did Taming of the Shrew in first year, then Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth in third year and Hamlet in fourth year. Plus a set novel and set poetry. It wasn't a big deal, it was fresh to us regardless of how many times it had been taught across the school before. But agree it does sound like the teachers are trying to boost results by ramming the same texts down their throats that they've done before.

We do lots of Neil Gaiman, the old poems from different cultures, dystopian fiction, To Kill a Mockingbird, Sherlock Holmes etc at KS3. As well as Shakespeare. Told we have to lose Martin Pig though-not challenging enough apparently.

It's not anyone's fault your DD's school is shit apart from the school's, I'm afraid. Teaching GCSE texts lower down the school is lazy.

And from your list, my department have taught Dickens, Austen, The Scarlet Letter, Bukowski, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Merchant of Venice.

I haven't taught On The Road, but I have taught in my career Postcards, The Lovely Bones, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, The Virgin Suicides, Stardust, short stories of Oscar Wilde, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, Pink Mist, The Monk, Guante, Benjamin Zephaniah, Regeneration, Never Let Me Go, Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, The Bloody Chamber... varied enough for you?

I didn't do Macbeth. I got stuck with Measure for Measure. Also known as the Shakespeare one no has heard of!
I suppose the curriculum sticks with novels that have plots that teach important times in history or understanding politics or different lives etc. That's all fine but if you are reading a novel about a specific historical event/time and you haven't already learned about that history or know of it then you won't fully understand it. I often thought (way back when I was at school which was 1980s) that more school subjects should cross over and be more relevant to each other. Ie if learning about the Holocaust in history lesson , read Anne Frank in English lesson. But this wouldn't work so much at gcse level as people do different subjects. Many people say the way they had to pick apart novels at school put them off certain authors or even reading in general (me included for some books). Perhaps gcse English lit should focus on different genres and writers and not be about studying in depth such a small amount of books and analysing why character A does this and character B does that (yawn). When you look at what books actually sell and are popular it is a very different list to what is on a gcse book list.

I did GCSEs 15 years ago and remember doing Jane Eyre, Lord of the Flies, As You Like It, and some wonderful poetry.

Jane Eyre is still a firm favourite. I loved it so much I went home and read the whole thing after reading chapter 1 in class. It got me into eating porridge too after she complained about it so much at her boarding school. I had it with lots of sugar and thought it was delicious

Agree Animal Farm is a bit thin without the political context. 1984 is far better, I think.

Your dd ‘hates anything with tension’? Then there’s not much point her reading or watching anything ever. Tension is how books and films create excitement, instead of the story being flat and one-paced.

Every story needs a ‘monster’ - what would Jaws be without the shark, sleeping beauty without the wicked fairy??

Tension is what keeps readers turning pages.

‘bloody’ Macbeth indeed
It is an amazing play on so many levels with such relevance to today. There is betrayal, manipulation, murder, and deceit with a touch of the supernatural thrown in.
We did Julius Caesar in Yr7 equivalent and my own dd did A Midsummer Night’s Dream . I seem to remember Henry 1V part 2 for O Level. My life would have been poorer without Shakespeare in it.

@bookmum08 - that’s exactly what teachers do at GCSE. Everything is related to the background of the author, the time the book was written, what else was going on. Everything is cross-curricular and students are encouraged to make links.

@TheOnlyLivingBoyInNewCross - what a great list!

TheonlylivingboyinNewCross you got to teach The Virgin Suicides? I adored that book!

Pipotle your porridge story is adorable 😊😊

We didn't do Macbeth at school, we did Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello instead. We did do An Inspector Calls, Lord of the Flies, Midwich Cuckoos, Death of a Salesman and loads of others - I was quite happy DS did similar because we were able to talk about the texts and their themes together.

What my English teacher did was set us a challenge to read 50 books over the course of our GCSEs that weren't on the syllabus, and gave us a huge list of recommendations. I broadened my reading genres through this challenge and read loads of Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontes and Jane Austen as well as more modern texts that were set in the early to mid 20th century. Some of those are even now comfort reads - could you encourage a similar thing for your DD?

About Harry Potter not being good literature (I only made it to book 4 so can't comment) but I think it would make an interesting study of why the books became popular and looking at other books that were the 'thing' of their time - Charles Dickens was the soap operas of the day with his stories released in chapters. Learning about books rather than learning a specific books is something I would of rather done at gcse.

We did twelfth night.... we went to watch it performed at the Barbican.

Post play, Teacher asks what we thought of the performance and asks for examples of how the play has been 'modernised'. I shove my hand up and recount with great delight ''tis the beef that makes them mad' (this was at the height of BSE mania). Teacher (furious) 'they haven't changed the script'!!!

That said. It's still the only Shakespeare play I can understand/enjoy. I'm pretty sure you need drugs to understand a midsummer nights dream.

Can 'modern' literature be dissected and extrapolated in the same way as older books where there was more census and less acceptance of free speech or alternative ideas? There's not much I read now that doesn't seem to be want to be read at much other than face value.

So it’s teachers ‘boosting results’ by ‘ramming’ Shakespeare repeatedly down children’s throats.
Or-core departments with tiny budgets, insane staff turnover and performance related pay making shortsighted decisions about text choice.
IME, the latter.
The OP’s Dd’s school has made some limiting choices it seems. But there is variety out there and if you’re lucky, the capacity for it. Schools don’t always have the opportunity to exploit the curriculum to its fullest.

theunrivalledjoy really? How does it work? English lit is a compulsory subject but history/sociology/politics /religious studies aren't so how can the curriculums cross over? Genuine question.

Some of the books dc did at gcse and a level were not even written when I was at school! Most were staples though.

Well my daughter did boy in the striped pyjamas. Which ofcourse wan't written when I was at school
I did the taming of the shrew in drama. Don't know anyone else that did that.
When I took English GCSE at night school I did Therese Raquan (Emile Zola) Again I don't know anyone who did that.

Girls' grammar school 1950s: Julius Caesar, Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Richard the Second, Twelfth Night, Othello, She Stoops to Conquer, The Rivals, Androcles and the Lion, St. Joan.
Travels with a Donkey, A Tale of Two Cities, Silas Marner, Youth and other Stories(Conrad).

Blimey, things have been dumbed down since then, @eddiemairswife!

I recently found out that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime is now used for GCSEs. Think that this is a great thing, it is up to date and deals with issues of modern life which students will probably find more relevant and therefore easier to study.

Sounds like bad planning by the school rather than anything else or deliberate to try to give themselves an advantage?
I enjoyed Macbeth & love Animal Farm but like all literature it's subjective.
I think getting rid of Of Mice and Men is my favourite Michael Gove decision ever (not the rest of American literature just that) - loathed and detested that book on a first read & it got worse with deeper analysis.

It would be nice to have more modern classics - I think I'd quite like the job of deciding which ones 😂