“What about the mental health impact of resits?” I was asked, when addressing an FE English and maths conference just after Covid.
“Yes, they can definitely help,” I replied.
The conference had temporarily moved online, so I was safe from my recurring nightmare of being shanked in the toilets at that event. But I couldn’t unsee a comment in the chat: “They won’t help my students.”
It lingers; the comedy of such low professional esteem, mixed with pity for students who deserve better, and the tragedy of a teacher who has lost belief in their own subject.
I became an English teacher because I believe stories have the power to change lives. I have seen them do so seismically, redrawing young people’s trajectories. And I have seen them do so subtly, providing moments of joy, hope and curiosity.
More recently, I have been reminded of their power through my own need.
A year ago, my mum died suddenly. The façade of grown adult immediately crumbled, sending a little boy running back to reading and writing stories.
“All I could think was that tomorrow cannot come. Time cannot go on. I am pulling the emergency brake of time,” explains Margaret, in Lev Grossman’s young-adult story The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. She relives her mother’s last day on loop. It is the kind of elegant and beautiful metaphor reliably found in YA fiction.
Teen novels provide vicarious survival training for the turbulence of life that will never be found in the ephemera of functionalism or the pedantry of linguistics, but which is completely compatible with the open text choices of the current English Language GCSE.
And they scale in accessibility from tailored ‘hi-lo’ (high chronological age, low reading age) options, through to the aspirationally-literary, allowing a well-designed resit course to lead students through a bookshelf that stands a chance of engaging them, moving them and connecting them to something beyond assessment requirements.
Stories have the power to change lives
I once spent most of a term carefully exploring the novel Thirteen Reasons Why, with more than one resit learner remarking, “This is like therapy”.
Writing, too, is a crucial mental health intervention. Students will take the opportunity to tell their own stories of grief, given the space to write freely. Some did so under a research project, leaving me with samples of the writing and permission to share them.
A health and social care student described her father entering a hospice: “We went up to see Dad, he wasn’t looking his best but I could see he was still fighting. The nurses there let me give him his tablets, take him to the bathroom, and change the dressings on his legs because I wanted Dad to know that I tried.”
A foundation student with speech and language difficulties discovered his voice in writing: “Mum walked in crying and said ‘I’m so so sorry but your dad passed away this morning’… I was starting to cry. On that day I didn’t have any friends because days before this, someone got me in big trouble.”
The catharsis of literacy should not be the preserve of those from better-off backgrounds who more reliably achieve it by age 16.
Supporting learners to read and write stories is what GCSE English resits look like when teachers are, in turn, supported to do the thing that made them sign up to the job in the first place.
Those stories will empower and inspire our young people, and will be there for them when they wouldn’t have known they needed them.
“Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself – those are awful things,” the narrator of John Green’s Looking for Alaska acknowledges feelings that could seem crushing and were too much for his friend, “but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable.”
Being human means inevitably experiencing times of poor mental health. Stories help young people to talk and learn about the normalcy of sadness, loss and hopelessness. They gift a resource of companionship and an outlet of self-expression that will lend strength, whenever it is needed, and will remind them that it is not forever.
The need for English has never been greater.
Read all of Andrew Otty’s Uncivil Servant columns here
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