Carol Atherton is shattered. Her classroom may have emptied for the day, but the final push before A-levels and GCSE exams has sent her into “marking overdrive”. Head of English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire, she has been teaching for almost 30 years and has covered largely the same set texts her entire career, but her enthusiasm for the job – and the texts – remains undimmed. As times change and new generations appear, the relevance of the poems, plays and novels doesn’t fade, it evolves.
Take today’s lesson on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), which sparked a conversation about victim blaming – depressingly still a hot topic in 2024. Tess has been raped by Alec, then has a child as a result of this and the child dies. “At the point where Alec comes back,” says Atherton, “he’s calling Tess a temptress, making his behaviour her fault and her responsibility. The students were really shocked by this.” Literature has the power to invoke empathy in ways news headlines can’t.
Then there’s Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess (1842), a window into toxic masculinity and coercive control that might just sink deeper into developing psyches than a preachy assembly. You would be convinced of this if you were to read chapter one of Atherton’s book, Reading Lessons. It is partly a pleasing romp through the set texts of the nation’s collective youth – from Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls – exploring why they resonate today. It is also a love letter to the threatened academic subject of English Literature, touchingly threaded throughout with memoir and an exploration of what stories mean to young people.
An Inspector Calls (1945), she says, feels more relevant now than at any other time in her career. “At a time of austerity, the Covid and Post Office inquiries,” she says, “it’s getting students who are at the beginning of their political understanding to think about how power is used and misused. Who are the victims and why are the people wielding the power not more aware of the consequences of what they’re doing?”
The cupboard doors behind Atherton’s desk are neatly decorated with pictures – Charlotte Brontë, Philip Larkin, a Macbeth display, studded with pictures and questions. The trick for engaging children in the themes in the texts, she says, is to start with an isolated line, or imagery. “With Macbeth, we use something metaphorical like chess pieces. We have to find a way of hooking them, connecting them with a central idea, character or emotion.” If she began by saying they were going to read one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, she’d meet resistance. “Whereas thinking about ambition, fear and that feeling that you’ve done something you can’t undo is something teenagers can connect with.”
There are newer additions to the curriculum, including Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin, My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal, “which is about a boy growing up in a foster family”, and the play Princess and the Hustler by Chinonyerem Odimba, “set around the Bristol bus boycott in the 1960s”. But that doesn’t mean these books will become widely used overnight. “In terms of resourcing, and at a time when teachers are judged so much on the results that our students get, changing to a completely different set text feels quite frightening. Do I know that this text is going to produce the kind of results that An Inspector Calls does?”
In her chapter on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which is set in a similar rural northern setting to where Atherton grew up, she recalls the importance of seeing one’s own world reflected on the page: “It gives you a sense that your surroundings have a deeper resonance.” Her year nines are reading Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, an American writer of Lithuanian heritage, “and because we have a lot of students from Lithuanian backgrounds,” she says, “it’s opened up for them conversations with their families, about their own pasts that they hadn’t necessarily thought to ask questions about before.”
Not that these discussions will win the children points in exams. “When I started teaching,” says Atherton, “there was much more of a sense that we were fostering a relationship with the text, rather than getting students to jump through hoops and meet required assessment objectives.” Now, English Literature and English Language are endangered academic subjects. “A few years ago, we had three students doing A-level English Literature. At that level, courses become unviable.” This was partly down to STEM subjects being heavily pushed in recent years, “and I think increasingly that students go into university thinking about the salary that they’re going to get on graduation.”
Numbers are climbing again now – with 15 in the upper sixth doing English Literature – after a push to highlight how it can inform careers like “law and management, the media and personnel. I’ve got a big wall display out in the corridor featuring a number of our former students who’ve done English at A-level and who are in careers now, where they are using that knowledge.”
Finding and retaining good teachers is becoming harder, too. “When I started, there was a sense that it was a job for life, whereas people now are leaving early, and it is the pressure of workload, the endless accountability. It is a really tough job.” What needs to change? “I think it’s respect for our professional status. A sense that once you’ve been teaching for more than a few years, you are bringing a huge amount of experience of what works and what doesn’t work, and how to handle a class full of teenagers last thing in the day. They are exhausting.”
But while parents often worry when their little bookworms are suddenly more interested in their phones and social lives than novels, Atherton believes “they’re often consuming narrative in other forms”. “Whether that is film, or graphic novels, which are a really big thing for some of our students, and give them really challenging, interesting things to talk about. Things like the Neil Gaiman books that have been adapted into graphic novel form. We have quite a lot of students who read manga.”
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Her students consume a lot of nonfiction, too, on their phones. Popular topics include politics – “At the moment, a lot about the conflict in the Middle East, issues around gender and gender politics, or ethnicity, sport, computing.” In her experience, teenagers can be switched off by the notion that they need to love books. “Let’s think about loving stories instead, the discussion of individuals’ experiences of the world, and the way that different people experience their reality.” Her son gets his stories through films. “He is not a reader, but he loves narrative and he knows huge amounts about the Vikings, about Batman, and mythos and origin stories.”
Back in class, Atherton is employing tactics to fight the rise in students thinking: “Why should I sit down and write something myself when I can get AI to do it for me?” She gives them little creative writing exercises to remind them of the pleasure of finding, “exactly the right word, or the right sentence structure so they think, ‘I’ve really nailed that.’”
Whether it is the simple joy of self-expression, how to answer exam questions or a deeper understanding of toxic masculinity, teaching, says Atherton, is an iterative process. “A poem that we might teach early in year 10, we come back to when they are 18 months older, and more mature and experienced in the world, and they show a much more thoughtful side of themselves. It is about dropping ideas like a pebble and kind of sitting back and having faith that the ripples will be there at some point.”
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Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton (Penguin Books Ltd, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.