How to transform English teaching in your department

Transforming an English department is a different kind of work from rewriting an English curriculum. Curriculum change is intellectual; you can do most of it on paper over a summer. Departmental change is human; it involves five or eight or twelve teachers, each with their own training, taste, history with the school, and views on what English is for. The reforms that look beautiful on the planning document tend to land roughly when they collide with the people who have to deliver them.

This is not a counsel of despair. English departments do transform, and the better ones tend to follow a fairly recognisable pattern. They start with one or two changes rather than a redesign. They take buy-in seriously. They sequence the reforms over years rather than terms. And they leave space for the disagreements that any English department contains about what the subject is.

This guide is aimed at HoDs and second-in-departments who are leading or about to lead English transformation, and at SLT who are wondering why the last attempt did not quite stick. The thinking here draws loosely on Mary Myatt's work on curriculum and on Christine Counsell adjacent thinking about disciplinary coherence, but the focus is on the leadership of change rather than its theory.

Departmental change in English carries its own complications around canon, assessment culture and reading-for-pleasure habits. English teachers, as a group, have stronger personal stakes in what gets taught than colleagues in many other subjects. The texts, the canon decisions, the way poems are read, the relative weight of reading and writing, the place of grammar, the question of what 'English' even is: These are not neutral pedagogical questions. They map onto values, identity and the reasons people came into the profession.

This is partly why the 'we've always done it this way' response, when it appears, has more force in English than in other subjects. The current scheme of work is rarely an arbitrary accumulation; it usually represents the previous HoD's considered view of what English is for. Replacing it is not just updating a document; it is making a statement about whose vision wins.

The corollary is that reforms that fail to engage with this tend to fail. A new scheme of work imposed by SLT, without departmental ownership, will be taught technically but with the energy drained out of it. A change that respects the existing identity of the department, and brings the team into the design, tends to land much better even when the substantive reforms are similar.

Most English departments that need transformation do not need every part of the offer rebuilt. The useful early diagnostic is to identify which two or three areas are doing the most damage, and to leave the rest alone for now. The areas that tend to surface in audits are: The KS3 reading diet (what students actually read, in what order, with what amount of teacher modelling), the writing curriculum (how often students write extended pieces, whether the writing is properly taught or just set), the assessment design (whether assessments measure what was taught or what is convenient), and the reading culture (what happens with reading outside the lessons).

A reasonable starting move is to look at the destination first. If your Year 11 students are arriving at the GCSE under-prepared in one specific area (close reading of unseen poetry, structured analytical paragraphs, the willingness to write at length), work back from that. The thing they cannot do is usually a symptom of something earlier in the curriculum, and the earlier thing is what you fix. The 'transform everything' approach tends to dilute the energy across too many fronts; the 'fix the upstream thing' approach is more boring and more effective.

Canon refresh is the change English departments most often want to make and most often fumble. The wrong way to do it is to swap out half the texts in one go. The right way is closer to a structured conversation across the team about what the texts are doing, and then changing one or two at a time over multiple years.

The useful starting question is not 'which texts should we add or remove?' It is 'what is this text doing in the curriculum?' A text that is teaching a specific disciplinary move (close reading of imagery, navigation of unfamiliar register, sustained argument across a long form) cannot just be swapped for another text without thought. A text that is there because it is in the cupboard and someone in the department likes it is more easily replaced.

The argument about diversifying the canon (more women writers, more writers of colour, more contemporary texts alongside the traditional ones) is usually framed as ideological, and certainly has an ideological component, but the practical case is also strong. A canon that students recognise themselves in tends to engage them harder. A canon that connects to the world they know tends to make the analytical moves easier to teach. Departments that have run this work seriously usually report better engagement and broadly equivalent or better attainment, with the caveat that the data is not always cleanly attributable.

The sensible cadence is to introduce one new text per year group per year, run it for two years, and review it formally. After three or four years, the canon will have meaningfully refreshed without any single year feeling like upheaval.

Most successful English transformations do not run every reform in parallel. They sequence them. There is no one right order, but the following pattern tends to work in departments where the existing curriculum is reasonably stable: Start with assessment, then move to writing, then to reading, then to canon, then to wider culture.

Assessment first because it sets the floor for what the rest of the reforms can achieve. A department whose assessments are misaligned with the curriculum cannot tell whether reforms are working. Fixing assessment early gives you a measurement layer for everything that follows.

Writing second because most English departments under-teach the actual craft of writing. Students are asked to write extensively, but the explicit instruction in how to write (sentence structures, paragraph structures, the moves writers make) is often thin. Getting writing instruction in good order tends to lift performance across reading too, because students who write more precisely tend to read more precisely.

Reading third because once writing is being taught well, the reading work has somewhere to land. Close reading lessons that culminate in good written responses are more powerful than close reading lessons that culminate in vague class discussion.

Canon fourth because the texts you choose start to matter more once the disciplinary moves around them are being taught well. A great text taught with thin instruction is a waste; a moderately good text taught with strong instruction can be the best lesson of the year.

Reading culture last because it depends on the rest of the department being aligned. A reading culture is not built by a single initiative (a library refurbishment, an author visit, a tutor-time reading programme). It is built by the cumulative weight of an English department that visibly values reading, which means the curriculum has to be in shape first.

Buy-in is the part of departmental change that planning documents tend to underestimate. A reform that is technically correct but imposed without conversation will be implemented thinly. A reform that is moderately good but co-designed with the team tends to be implemented well. The trade-off is worth making in most cases.

The useful moves here are mostly low-key. Involve the team in the diagnosis before involving them in the solution; teachers who have helped identify the problem are more invested in fixing it. Pilot reforms with willing volunteers before rolling them out; the first delivery is always rougher than the final version, and willing pilots can shape the rougher edges before the rest of the team encounters them. Give the team enough time to absorb the change; an in-service day's CPD followed by 'now teach it differently from Monday' usually fails.

It also helps to be honest about disagreement. English departments contain real differences about what the subject is for, and a transformation that pretends those differences do not exist will not survive contact with reality. The HoD does not need to resolve every disagreement, but should be able to articulate what the department has agreed on, what remains a matter of professional judgement, and where the line between the two falls.

Reading culture is the easiest thing to talk about and the hardest thing to build. It is also, in most secondary schools, one of the highest-leverage cultural interventions an English department can drive. Students who read widely, voluntarily, and outside the curriculum tend to do better at English and across subjects. The relationship is one of the more robust findings in education research, though the direction of causation is partially debated.

Reading culture is built by accumulation, not by initiative. A library that is genuinely used, a tutor-time reading programme that has not been quietly abandoned, an English department that talks about books they are personally reading, parents who see reading valued: Each is a small contribution, but they compound. The HoD's job in this area is mostly persistence rather than novelty. The schools that have visible reading cultures are usually the ones where multiple staff, over multiple years, kept doing small things even when they did not appear to be working.

Reading for pleasure also benefits from being explicitly distinguished from reading for the curriculum. Students who only see reading framed as analysis tend to internalise reading as work. The reading-for-pleasure framing (we read because it is enjoyable, because it expands you, because it is its own reward) needs to be visibly held by the adults in the room. Departments where the teachers visibly read for pleasure (and talk about it) tend to produce students who do too.

It is worth being explicit, at the start of a transformation, about what success would look like in three years' time. Without that, the project tends to drift into 'we did some reforms' rather than 'the department is in a different place'. Useful success measures usually combine a few categories: Attainment (GCSE grades, but disaggregated to show progress across the cohort, not just headlines), engagement (option uptake at GCSE and A-Level, KS3 student voice on whether they enjoy English), curriculum coherence (teacher voice on whether the scheme feels joined-up, lesson observation evidence), and culture (library usage, reading-for-pleasure data if you can get it).

No single measure is sufficient. A transformation that lifts headline grades but leaves the department feeling fractured has not really succeeded. A transformation that improves culture but does not move attainment in any visible way will not survive SLT scrutiny. The honest version of success is a portfolio of indicators moving in roughly the right direction over multiple years.

It is also worth being honest about regression. Departments transform and then drift back if the gains are not maintained. The reforms that stick are usually the ones that became routine (the new assessment cycle is just how we assess now; the writing instruction is just how we teach writing now) rather than the ones that remained initiatives. The HoD's role in years three, four and five is mostly maintaining the routines that were built earlier, which is less exciting than building them but is what determines whether the transformation lasts.