No doubt to the dismay of the Twittersphere, I have to report that the idea that our teenagers should be asked to read a few older works of English literature before the statutory school-leaving age was mine, not Michael Gove's. When the GCSE reforms were being considered, the Department for Education called in an advisory group of teachers, examiners and other stakeholders. I was there in my twin capacity as a university teacher and an active player in the educational work of the Royal Shakespeare Company.I have teenagers of my own, I visit schools and I meet prospective university students from very diverse backgrounds. In recent years, I have been increasingly alarmed at how many of them have not read a single work of English literature written before 1900, apart from Shakespeare. I've also found it depressing how often teenagers have said to me that their main GCSE set text was John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, which they found tedious, undeveloped, overly schematic and all too easy to reduce to a set of themes instead of a literary experience. In short, an insufficiently demanding book.

I also suggested to the group that teachers teach best when they teach what they are passionate about. So why not abandon the notion of set texts altogether, and let teachers tailor their choices to the particular circumstances of each class? Instead of a year-in-year-out diet of predictable texts, there should simply be a requirement of breadth: at least one Shakespeare play, at least one 19th-century novel, a selection of poetry, including a taste of the Romantics (who invented our modern idea of poetry as the true voice of feeling) and a novel or play from the rich diversity of English literature written in the century between 1914 and 2014. There would be a set range, not a body of set texts.

A play, a couple of novels and a poetry anthology hardly seems an excessive load for study in years 9 to 11. I imagined teachers being reinvigorated by the prospect of, say, engaging their year 9 class with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (told from the point of view of a young child, it's a perfect book to get 12 and 13-year-olds into serious reading), then for the examined texts in years 10 and 11, teaching their own combination of works that they loved and that they thought would both stretch and engage their pupils. In my mind's eye, I saw a multi-ethnic inner-city academy school comparing Shakespeare's Othello and Zadie Smith's White Teeth in the light of questions of race, then using the poetry of John Clare as a way of exploring the profound connection between human society and the natural environment. Meanwhile, those in the class of a technological disposition could discuss Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the dangers of modern science, while those more interested in affairs of the heart could read Jane Eyre. No one would be bored. Examiners would be relieved from their tick-box approach and the tedium of reading 1,000 essays, all taking the same line, on Of Mice and Men. Questions would be open and generic. Creativity, imagination and originality would be rewarded (though marks would still be given for accurate use of English).

I was delighted to see that the broad GCSE English guidelines emerging from the Department for Education followed the path I had suggested almost to the letter. I am completely baffled at how and why this attempt to liberate teachers and bring the best out of our schoolchildren by stretching and stimulating them to the utmost turned this week into a global Twitterstorm about the banning of Harper Lee. I fear that the real culprits are the craven examination boards, who cannot free themselves from a ludicrously old-fashioned notion of a canon of set texts.