At Key Stage 4, the national curriculum specifies three core subjects that all students must be taught: English, maths, and science. As most schools choose to teach GCSEs for this age group, the majority will teach both English Language and English Literature. The EBacc, which many schools strive for their students to achieve, requires both exams to be taken. As a result, an overwhelming majority of students have to take both, whether they like it or not.

Unlike the other core subjects, which provide basic knowledge that will be useful in everyday life, English Literature is largely a subject that you need to be passionate about to benefit from. Personally, I think that English Literature should not be compulsory in as many schools as it is today, seeing as it is not something that is necessary for most students’ futures. There’s no need to abolish it entirely, but it should be something that students choose to do because they enjoy it, not because they are forced to.

English Literature itself does not provide any basic skills for a student in the future – most grammar and writing techniques are taught and assessed in English Language. It primarily consists of analysing extracts from a given set of novels, which is assessed in English Language, the only difference being that the novel and thus extract is not known beforehand and it makes up a smaller proportion of the exam. For this reason, there are few skills covered in the subject that are not already taught for English Language. Furthermore, a case could be made that a student’s success rests disproportionately on their ability to memorise quotes, as the new 9-1 exams are not open book. This means that a candidate can be incredibly good at analysing texts, which is objectively the goal of this subject, yet not be able to achieve a high grade because they’re not good at remembering quotes.

A common argument against removing English Literature from the curriculum is that it teaches texts that are historically significant. However, if learning about history is suddenly of such high importance, it would make far more sense to make history compulsory instead of English Literature. Why is it that there were twice as many entrants for English Literature than History GCSE last year? Probably because it was compulsory for most of them. As with history, we also have another question to ask ourselves: is the subject relevant for the present day? How do students benefit from reading texts that are decades, if not centuries, old? This is less of an issue for history as a large proportion of students take the subject by choice, but the same cannot be said for English Literature. The issue is compounded when you consider the difficulties in understanding the differences between the language used back then, most notably in Shakespeare’s pieces, and the language that we use today. It only serves to make things more difficult, and learning about it will have no future benefit for the majority of students. English Literature is an outdated subject. There is no issue with this and the same can be said about other subjects too, but taking it for GCSE should be by choice and not compulsory for such a large number of students in the UK.

This isn’t to take away from the significance of some of the texts that are covered: some of the novels are indeed very interesting and well worth the time it takes to read them. Perhaps the aim of the subject is to get students interested in reading, not to assess their analytical skills? In that case, making the subject compulsory at GCSE could instead have the opposite of the intended effect. At the ripe age of 16, students aren’t always the most engaged with their learning. This leads to students not actually paying attention to what they are learning about, and some go into their exams having not fully read the book they’re supposed to write an essay about. Even worse, many are put off of reading as a whole because their English Literature lessons were boring and unengaging. The notion that English teachers overanalyse specific parts of texts that have no relation to the author’s intentions doesn’t do any favours for the subject either. It is only those who decide to pick up reading as a hobby later in life who are able to fully appreciate some of the books that they previously read in school, now that they are reading it by choice for their own enjoyment and not because the curriculum said they have to.