Article Gold Open Access 2022

Reading the Word Instead of the World: GCSE English Re-sits and the Divorce of Literacies from Their Lifeworld Use

VR
Veitch, Rose
Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education
Journal · Vol. 29 · Issue 2 · pp. 124-140
Abstract

This paper explores GCSE English re-sits in post-16 education. The re-sit policy was introduced in England and Wales to improve national literacy rates, yet persistently poor pass rates have drawn robust criticism of the policy. This article argues that traditional discourses of literacy predominate and contribute towards antagonisms between re-sit students and subject English. The high-stakes nature of the qualification and associated performativity pressures compound the difficulties. High levels of test-teaching and technique-spotting impair the ambit of the GCSE re-sit programme to deliver the type of literacy which the policy purports to improve. This autoethnographic study correlates the GCSE re-sit landscape with Paulo Freire’s ‘banking model’ of education and uses the work of The New Literacies Studies to suggest that dominant “autonomous” discourses of literacy are impeding educators’ appreciation of literacies as situated practices. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

Author Keywords

policy Literacy embedding post-16 education GCSE English re-sit technique spotting

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
School of Education, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
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