12 July 2007

Ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you very much for your kind invitation to speak to you today. I'm delighted to do so, since the subjects we're contemplating are dear to my heart. But I feel I should begin in precisely the way that all speakers everywhere are told they should avoid. With an apology. Or a note of caution, at least. I do not teach and never have taught fulltime in primary or secondary schools (all my teaching has been and is within universities). And I do not have any formal connection to the QCA or other affiliated bodies. On the other hand, I have visited many dozens of schools over the last few years in my role as Poet Laureate, and have always been made to feel very welcome in my conversations with the QCA about education matters - especially by Ken and by Sue. Indeed, it was Sue with whom I worked most closely when we devised the Writing Together scheme, of which a little more anon. So I hope you’ll feel that what I'm about to say is informed by experience, albeit not of a precisely formal kind.

Many years ago, when I had more money than I do now (I mean, before I had children of my own) I used to collect Staffordshire figures. Not the really expensive kind, but the varieties that non-connoisseurs can afford now and again after some determined saving. It was figures of writers that especially interested me, and I ended up with a few versions of Shakespeare, a Milton, and a Byron. The Byron, which is about a foot high, and shows him wearing a very fetching and approximately Greek skirt, was originally made to stand on some kind of mantle-shelf, available to admiring eyes but not to possibly-fumbling fingers. And because it was designed to be out of reach in this way, the people who decorated it after the firing decided to save money. The painted the front of the figure, but not the back.

Over the years this Byron has stood above my own fireplace, I have come to think of it as representing (among other things) the opposite of what we look for in a properly-educated person. I mean, we want a properly-educated person to be painted round the back, as well as on the front. And this, I’m delighted to say, is just what the latest revisions to the curriculum are intended to do. Building on the discussions we had around the time of English 21, they represent, for the first time in several generations, a coherent attempt to draw the manifold and varied emphases of education into a whole. Regardless of subject - by which I mean, paradoxically, with due regard to all subjects - they stress the need to develop critical and appreciative skills, to discover and enjoy cultural diversity, to develop and deepen competence, and to value and validate creativity. They deserve a very warm welcome.

Inevitably, I suppose, I want to concentrate especially on creativity in what I have to say. But before I come to that, there are a few other thoughts I’d like to share with you. The foundation stone of the revised curriculum is a belief in the need for education to be conceived as not so much a massive cramming-job, in which pupils are coerced into swallowing and with a bit of luck digesting the facts and figures which will equip them for later life, but rather to present education as a form of personal development. To offer and interpret all subjects as a way of nurturing the individual self and thereby discovering and releasing its potential, and in the process to allow that individual self to acquire the skills and interests which are essential to the definition of a good citizen. In other words, the curriculum is here to speak to needs which are at once personal and social, particular and general. This doesn’t mean it represents a return to the old days of so-called 'trendy teaching' (though I have seen some pieces in newspapers here and there, which accuse it of being precisely that). It means that it seeks to establish a sensible balance between education as a means of discovering the things which are necessary to bind us into civic life, while at the same time liberating pupils to be the people they have it in themselves to become.

As I say, it is entirely appropriate that this balance should be struck across the whole range of subjects available to pupils. After all, one of the greatest privileges of childhood (and also of course one of its difficulties) is not yet having a personality or enthusiasms which are set in stone. In our own time, ladies and gentlemen, we set about our schooling, didn't we, with our eyes wide to see what might take our fancy, fire our imaginations, quicken our intelligence. So it is now for the next generation – only more so than ever, I think, under the new dispensation. By requiring pupils to address an appropriate range of subjects, and to discover the necessary skills within each, and to combine these things with the realisation of personal attributes which bring fulfilment as well as confidence, the curriculum makes education rounded as well as meaningful, a source of adventure as well as stability.

The notion of creativity is essential to this, whether we consider it in general or particular terms. To take the generalities first. By encouraging pupils to think creatively, in whatever subject they might be pursuing, we are inviting them to generate genuinely new ideas; we are asking them to think about how their world was shaped; and we are allowing them to understand how it exists in a condition of permanent change - change of which they are a part. These opportunities occur just as valuably in science subjects and mathematics as they do in the humanities. Regardless of context, the same emphasis falls on questions of continuity and chronology, on issues of community (the community of commonly-held ideas) and diversity, and on the need for individual interpretation of received ideas as well as for a consideration of how those ideas came to be received in the first place.

But creativity means stretching the imagination too - in fact I take that to be its primary meaning - and here the new curriculum provides an especially rich set of opportunities. But before touching on a few of these opportunities, let me say that I think they do and will work most powerfully for the good of pupils when they are allied to pragmatic and more traditional expectations. To clarify this, I’ll stick to the subject I know best, English, on condition that you realise I want to imply that there are equivalent combinations to be made in all other subjects.

Because the teaching of English has always and quite rightly been focused on the discussion of imaginative texts (on novels and poems), it is of all subjects the one most available to creative interpretation. But this can only realise its fullest potential when it rests on a secure foundation. That's to say, however much time and encouragement pupils are given to delve into their own heads, the outcome will only be adequately coherent, interesting and socialised if it is based on a secure understanding of how English works. And this means acquiring a proper knowledge of linguistic and artistic forms, and on learning the proper skills of analysis, interpretation and expression. Which in turn means acquiring an appropriately wide knowledge of existing writing – on learning how to evaluate its aims, on appreciating the culture (whether national or more local) from which it arises, on developing a sense of the heritage and how it came to be considered heritage. Overflows of powerful feeling can... well, powerful - but they will only be powerful to others if they are secure in their understanding of the basics. And this applies just as much to people who wants to end up thinking and writing experimentally as it does to people who want to go down more traditional routes.

In other words, the creativity we want to see within English studies, and within other disciplines as well, rests on reading as much as it does on writing. On reading texts which are original in their forms and languages and ideas, which can be said to have exerted an influence and provoke pleasure as well as thought, which reflect the diversity of society at large, which have the potential to connect with other subjects, and which challenge perceptions of what is familiar and acceptable. I've been into enough schools to know how challenging it can be to teach challenging things - especially to those refusnicks (not all of them boys, though many of them are boys) who turn away from reading, and from poetry in particular, as they hit puberty. And this means I can sympathise with teachers who try and re-engage their interest by appealing directly to their existing interests. I mean, I can understand why, if they have a class full of boys who would rather have their toe-nails pulled out than read a poem, but who love football, they would want to give them a poem about football to study. It would make for a quieter life. But if poems about football and other aspects of their familiar world are all they get, then the challenge of English has been muted. Literature, after all, helps us to recognise boundaries but also exists to take us across them. Its challenge is to stretch us, surprise us, shock us, propel us beyond ourselves. It can make us citizens of the world, not just of our street or immediate community.

By and large, the poems and novels recommended for the curriculum all do issue this kind of challenge - for which the choosers deserve a good deal of credit. And as I say this, I mean to imply that I strongly endorse their wish to make connections between contemporary writing and works produced by the mighty dead. The sometimes-unfamiliar language of things written before our own time, the obscurity of certain references and so on, can all seem slightly daunting to someone reading them for the first time. But the fact is and always has been that we can only properly understand the present by realising the extended as well as the immediate context in which it was produced. Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Tennyson may sound different when they tell us what it’s like when they’re in love, or mourning someone, or looking at a landscape, but the quality of their feeling is essentially familiar to us. Indeed, their greatness as writers depends on their ability to make their own lives exist in a kind of ghostly parallel to our own. As pupils learn to appreciate this, the resonance of their own experience deepens - it is another way of becoming a citizen of the world.

Before I leave this thought, I'd like to enter one caveat. Strongly as I support the existing choice of texts, I have to admit that I'd like to see the selection changing more regularly than it does. I know teachers are over-worked, and I know how much time it takes to work up knowledge of a new text in order to teach it - I’ve done enough of that myself to feel the pain. But I also know that when I’m interviewing students for my own course at Royal Holloway, the great majority of younger candidates who want to study poetry with me have only read Simon Armitage and Carol-Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke. I’ve nothing against these poets, in fact I admire them all. But I think the curriculum is missing a trick if it turns out thousands of pupils into the world each year, for many years at a stretch, who think that these are the only people to have written poems since Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin hung up their pens.)

Here endeth the caveat. As I was saying: the curriculum's emphasis on creative reading is deeply welcome. And so is its support for elements of creative writing – which I’ll close by saying a few things about. For many years creative writing has been encouraged in primary schools as a necessary part of education, and over the last generation or so we've seen it explode as a subject within universities at undergraduate and MA level. Twenty five years ago there were a handful of MA Creative Writing courses round the country, now there are over fifty. But what about secondary level? There's comparatively little - which means that as far as Creative Writing is concerned, the education system is like a sandwich with no filling.

Why is this? In the old days people used to say they weren’t sure about the intrinsic value of creative writing, and to add that even if it could be proved, there was no sensible way to assess it. Neither of these forms of opposition will do any more. Because creative writing is a profoundly effective way of bolstering and developing the need for personal development which lies at the heart of the national curriculum, it can be said to be a natural ally of the new ethos. And because so many universities have tried and tested forms of assessment (involving evidence of additional reading, the effort put into revision, etc), we now know how it can be made to fit within the necessary structure of weighing and marking.

In other words, there are no excuses left for ignoring the value of creative writing within secondary schools. I’d like to go on about those values for a long time - but since I have to sit down in a minute let me just say two things. Creative writing is invaluable as a means of deepening pupils’ understanding as readers. To be asked to write an imaginative response to a set text, whether in the form and language of that text, or as a more nearly free-standing thing, takes the writer down into the engine room of the work. It sharpens attention to language, it reveals what is difficult and what is less so, it ratifies the understanding of form, and it lifts into the present an observation made or a sentiment felt in the past. It doesn’t matter if the response is less than a masterpiece – masterpieces in this context are not the point. The point is that this kind of writing can be as or even more effective a means of analysis as the more traditional kinds.

The differently reactive kinds of creative writing - the kinds in which pupils deal with their own experiences and thoughts and feelings as ends in themselves – are even more valuable. To say that it boosts personal development, which is your goal in everything, is putting it mildly. It is quite simply a matchless form of self-discovery, self-organisation and self-validation. In this respect, the Writing Together scheme, which as I said at the outset was something I worked on closely with Sue Horner, played a vital part in the thinking which underpins this tweaked curriculum. As we made arrangements for writers to visit schools and run workshops, we had an almost unanimous vote of support from the teachers involved in the process. By giving the pupils the freedom to discover who they were, by helping them to acquire the means of communicating better with those around them, and by encouraging them to develop the whole range of their feelings, these classes not only added significantly to the study of English in all its varieties, but allowed the benefits to ripple outwards and nourish the study of other subjects as well.

One of the great pleasures of my time as Laureate has been to see this happening in the schools I’ve visited. In the process I’ve been reminded of my own early days as a pupil - a pupil who came from a very un-bookish background, and who struggled to find either pleasure or illumination in my studies. It was only in my mid-teens when, thanks to an inspired English teacher, I discovered the pleasures of reading and writing that I began to see the light. And what made the difference. I’ll tell you. In all subjects apart from English I was taught in a way which persuaded me that my response would either be right or wrong. Usually I was wrong. In English, I was able to feel that provided I got all the obvious information right (that such-and-such a poem was set at dawn not dusk, that it was about two people not three, and so on) - provided I’d got this basic stuff sorted out, I couldn’t be wrong. It was up to me. My imagination, my powers - such as they were - of association, my feelings were what mattered. Those recognitions are what I have tried to release in others during my own life as a teacher. And they are what the revised curriculum wants to release as well. May it prosper, and may the pupils and teachers who work with it prosper too.

Andrew Motion