Another time which illustrated my bad behaviour was when I was taught how to smoke by one of my two friends. It worked as I did smoke for a few years following that first attempt, crouched down behind a length of risen grass on a mound out on the extensive fields at the back of the school building. Once I got the hang of it, it was great as it gave me another and very real tool. With this tool I could now not wait to show off my amazing skills of trying to constantly fit in, to impress and to take away any attention from me and my feeble attempts to be in the slightest bit academic.
One lunch time I was smoking behind a mobile when an R.E teacher came up; he looked down towards the far end of the field and mentioned he could smell the smoke up here! Either he was being half kind at not wanting me to be in any further trouble, or he was just convinced in his own mind that the unmistakable odour of 1980’s Benson and Hedges cigarettes was indeed coming from around 100 metres away.
Staying with the smoking theme I took it one step further which was completely and utterly foolish. If I had thought it was not bad enough to be smoking outside at the back of the mobile, I actually smoked a cigarette inside the mobile! I did not have any fags on me that day, despite the fact that at the time you could buy a packet of ten B & H for less than 50p. I did this regularly using any money I had for dinner and food. I did though end up asking a dinner lady for a fag, yes really…and she did no more than give me one!
It was a short white roll up cigarette with no filter! She put it in one of those small thin plastic opaque cups that we had to use to drink water out of. She covered it with a small serviette and just handed it over. I was stood in the middle of a horizontal queue with people to the right and left of me. She was stood behind the counter with her dinner lady colleagues on either side of her. Criminal really! So, I had the fag, I may as well smoke it! I’m not sure what possessed me to carry through with the whole idea but there it was, I did it, I lit up and smoked an unfiltered cigarette in a mobile classroom.
This time I did not get away with it. Not long into the first lesson after lunch I was hauled out of class to face the deputy principle. I stood in front of him, he sat behind his formica desk and at first, I was really not at all sure he even knew what to say to me. Eventually he came up with a very weak, “What would your parents think?” I replied saying “I dunna know you’d better tell ‘em hadn’t you.” He did not however say one word to either of my parents. Looking back, that was one of the problems right there. As not one teacher listened to me from day one of me attending that awful school. They also continued not to listen to me throughout my miserable 4 years at the dreaded place. Instead, they just saw my bad behaviour with their eyes instead of listening with their ears to a pupil desperately crying out for help and support.
I was put in for C.S.E’S as I was deemed surely not clever enough for O levels. C.S.E’s were a Certificate of Secondary Education offering a lower graded attainment, much as functional skills do today. They were seen as less academic than O levels or their equivalent today, GCSE’s. I was not given either the choice or the chance to do anything other, so that was my supposed goal.
Mmm, give me something to aspire too, great. What could I actually do with CSE’s, that is of course if I actually ever passed any. Like today it would have been extremely useful to have achieved a decent pass in English language and maths. Needless to say, I felt there was not much chance of ever passing either of those subjects.
SETS FOR GCSE’s
Time then for sets,
where to place me,
according to need.
Better not put me up
with those than can spell,
remember and read.
So, I stayed in the middle
in the average band,
what was I, gone for a song?
Took instead 8 CSE’s
not worth the paper I wrote on.
Cause, I didn’t write in exams,
As there was simply nothing to inspire
I just did what was expected,
not care about work, just sat and stared
disaffected.
So, the time for my exams eventually arrived and as predicted I literally did just sit there disaffected. I can see myself now, I know exactly where I sat for my English exam, my science exam, my maths exams and my R.E exam. I did extremely badly in all of them and remember laying my head on the desk 12 minutes into a science paper as I just could not get it. An invigilator suggested I had another look; I did but then once again lay down my head. She then came and wrote on the front of my paper. Spent 12 minutes on this. Needless to say, I was ungraded for science. Should she have written on the front of my paper, I am not sure.
Exams are simply not the way to assess children; they are a test of memory and little else and we know that those children with dyslexia have weak memories. Teacher assessment through a school year is far better and this assessment does not need to be completed as a test.
It is surely far better to take more notice of work done in class. Good teachers know their children well, they know where their children are in terms of their achievements and attainment. They do not need ridicules standardised assessments tests (SATS) or G.C.S.E’s, if you are actually ‘lucky enough’ to be put in for them, to tell them what they already know. SATS are firstly taken at the age of 7 years old, Our 7-year-olds, yes just 7 years of age.
In some very sensible countries in the world, children do not even start school until the age of 7! Anyway a 7 year old needs to know, understand and be able to give answers for questions concerned with the following, take a deep breath, off e go…question marks, commas, semi colons, apostrophes, dashes, exclamation marks, commands, tenses, possessive pronouns and relative pronouns, antonyms, formal sentences, capital letters, brackets, noun phrases, relative clause, co-ordinating conjunctions, main clause, standard English, non-standard English, adverbials, synonyms, preposition phrase, pairs of commas, passive text, word classes, modal verbs, subject, prefix, suffix, hyphen, adjectives, nouns, adverbs, contracted forms, simple past and past progressive…and breath! This was from one of the four, yes four papers that our 7 years olds are being expected to compete.
There are two separate reading papers, reading comprehension one where a child needs to read shorter texts with questions give throughout. The second paper is concerned with a longer reading booklet with separate questions on varied texts. The child needs to write answers down following the reading of the whole passage. There are then two more papers testing grammar, punctuation, spelling and writing. Expectations for a 7 years olds writing are as follow; write sentences to form a short narrative about their own experiences and the experiences of and others, demarcating sentences with capital letters and full stops, segment spoken words into phonemes, individual sounds and letters representing these by graphemes, individual sounds but can be made up of more than one letter.
Spell with some phonically-plausible attempts being acceptable, the spelling some common exception words, correct letter formation and size relating to other letters, space between words, use capital letters and full stops, question marks, past and present tense, use co-ordination e.g. or, but, and, use some subordination e.g. when, if, that, because, segment spoken words into phonemes, and represent these by using graphemes, make edits, use commas for a list, apostrophes to mark singular, possession in nouns and contractions and use suffixes.
I make no apology for listing so much here. Just consider the amount of work for a child of 7 years old. Also consider the last time you used a subordinate clause or an adverbial and were aware of it. With respect, do you even know what they are? Nowhere in any of this did it mention to use your imagination, to be creative, to use your own free writing, no, each 7-year-old must accomplish the same level and wow betide child or teacher if they do not.
I taught year two for three years and at one OFSTED inspection I remember having a discussion, let’s call it, with one of the inspectors. He wanted to know why one child in particular had not reached the same level as other children. I explained to him that she had needed to have some absence for school due to her mum being very ill. This was not good enough for him though and he simply did not listen and just repeated his question, “Yes but why is she not the same level?” You being to lose the will.
But society expects this as there is the very real expectation of result. These results need to be physically seen on a bit of paper proving the level of attainment. Colleges expect this, universities expect this and employers expect this. I do not have G.C.S.E English language or G.C.S.E English literature but yet here I am years and years later teaching both subjects to that level.
The content and expectation for G.C.S.E English language and literature is enormous. Text needs to be read, understood and analysed using the correct terminology Reading must be completely comprehended from Shakespeare to the 19th century authors, in addition to a more modern author all need to be studied.
Shakespeare, William Shakespeare for goodness sake with his heady mix of challenging vocabulary, sentences changed and jumbled around for effect, words that are seemingly complete nonsense and character names hard to read and far too similar to each other! Subjects involving gruesome knife crime, numerous murders and suicide like Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet surely have no place on the bookshelf of a 16-year-old child, yet here we are!
In addition to this 15, yes 15 poems need to be read, understood, remembered, compared, analysed to within an inch of their lives and studied with the finest of toothcombs. The choice between, ‘Power and conflict’ poetry or ‘Love and relationships’ poetry usually ends with the vast majority of secondary schools opting for the Power and Conflict cluster.
More violence and deep trauma. More war, death, desperation, senseless violence and destruction. These themes are scrutinised over many months of study. Why can we not look at some nonsense poetry, study some humorous light-hearted or positive poetry?
Surely, we could give children the chance to actually play around with language and vocabulary. To have a go at writing creative poetry rather than be dragged down into the deeply disturbing world of power and conflict poetry with such lasting focus on violence.
Many people may not have even considered any sort of link between what teenagers are exposed to, in fine detail in English literature. In Romeo and Juliet, violence is the first answer to any sort of dispute with young people quickly drawing swords and murdering each other. The fully accepted solution to the fact that people do not get on, the two feuding families of Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague, is simply to kill them.
Secondly and just as horrific is when there is a problem in a relationship. The answer is resolved by pretending to die and ends in double suicide! Let’s just think about this through the eyes of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds and consider why it is so wrong on so many levels. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth the sorry and unforgivable themes continue. In Macbeth we have greed and coercive behaviour which lead quickly to multiple murders and suicide. So, on the one hand thought of suicide awareness and prevention is now being given time. I am hopeful it will become part of the teaching in our schools as it surely and rightly should be. This is then being completely conflicted by the teaching of Shakespearean tragedies offering no way out of a problem other than murder and suicide, its truly despicable! Over 200 children took their own lives in I go further, as I really do truly believe that the reading and microscopic examination of these plays and poems of such aggressive and destructive type, could and in fact does impact and influence knife crime.
Far, far too many murders, yes someone taking another person’s life, are becoming more and more frequent and the age of those committing the awful senseless acts are becoming so young and are now very often in their teenage years. In the United Kingdom, ‘a significant portion, 17% of all knife and offensive weapon offenses resulting in a caution or conviction were committed by children under the age of 18’, which means that there have been ‘over 3,200 knife-related offenses by children.’ (Gov.UK 2025). Do we not owe it to our children to protect them and shield them from this sort of horrific violence?
It is of course hard to collate date for the schools involved as they are often not named due to legal reasons. However, looking at some schools, where children convicted of serious knife crimes including murder attended, I have been able to find that have had pupils associated with knife crime have all studied Power and conflict poetry, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. So, the vast majority of them will have been exposed to such Shakespearean tales that I have previously mentioned. Along with social media, gaming, and maybe peer pressure, our whole education system and particularly that of examinations and the explicit material that needs to be read needs a complete overhaul. With so many other authors around surely, Shakespeare can take a back seat and still be available to those who choose it. Shakespeare if it ever wanted to be studied, can be done so when much older and when one may have some life experience behind them.
One day in year 9 or 10, we were given the choice of going to watch a Shakespeare play live in the hall. I cannot remember what lesson I got out of but of course I went. Anything, whatever it was surely outweighed the need for me to be sitting barely listening or taking anything in while sitting between the four cold walls of a threatening classroom. So, I entered the hall, sat down. I lasted five minutes and then left the hall, walked out of school and all the way back home. The whole thing was completely over my head. I cannot remember which play it was, probably A Midsummer Night’s Dream as that is often deemed a good introduction to Shakespeare, or maybe not! It got me out of lessons for the afternoon though so it did me a favour. I know I did not really give it a chance but really, what actual relevance did it have to me. What was the actual point of sitting through something I could barely even understand. Why on earth did Shakespeare feel as though he needed to completely mess about with both language and vocabulary in the way that he did. However surely a far more pressing question is why on earth are we still subjecting children to this torture?
