“Ofqual has banned Creative Writing from English A level,” Michael Rosen twitters. Another of his rueful, comic fantasies?
“I propose banning art from Art,” he twitters on. Why not indeed? It has a pleasing comic logic. Why not also ban music from Music, a ball from Football, plays from Drama – and education from schools? Couldn’t happen, could it? Not to Creative Writing, surely the very heart of English?
Well, Professor Rosen isn’t quite joking.
Ofqual did confirm last week that the Creative Writing A level will be axed by 2017, just four years after it was introduced in 2013. Eh?
I thought “creativity” was in fashion, a groovy buzzword for government wheezes, school prospectuses, mission statements, the CBI, CEOs, and headteachers on open evenings. It elicits much sanctimonious nodding.
Well, Creativity-Lite perhaps. The real thing, the 100 per cent Creative Writing 2013 exam, must be axed. Why? Perhaps it’s too “soft”, like Communications or Media Studies. Nicky Morgan, that dull echo of the damp squib of the Gove, seems to think so. She told students last year that doing the arts could “hold them back for the rest of their lives”. They must get real and stick to the STEM subjects.
The DfE says creative writing overlaps with English Language and Literature, is “more skills-based than knowledge-based” and has too few pupils. Flannel. And – here come da crunch – it’s too difficult “to secure valid assessment”. Ah. It’s not quite measurable – which means it can’t exist.
Worse flannel.
Teachers are angry and dismayed. The English and Media Centre defends the A level as “rigorous and challenging” and regards the decision as “political rather than educational or pedagogic”. There’s a petition (http://chn.ge/1KNGjR0). So far, 4,000-plus have signed.
I remember doing Creative Writing at A. It was the activity the pupils valued most. There’s much pretentious tosh spoken about “creativity”, but the real thing reaches parts nothing else can. It is essential and necessary and sometimes blue murder – as serious as your life. It can make you a stroppy, thinking, critical citizen. Of course banning it is “political”.
So is cutting music programmes and slashing arts grants. We do this at our peril. James Rhodes, concert pianist, thinks so: “We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity,” he writes in his transfixing autobiography, Instrumental. Indeed. Real creativity, he argues is good for you. Its absence can make you dull, quiescent, neurotic, unhappy, and even ill.
Can’t we draft in Michael Rosen and James Rhodes to advise Nicky Morgan?
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.