If you recognise words in that headline, there’s a reason. It’s an intertextual reference to Edith Nesbit’s Phoenix and the Carpet combined with an obscure movement in reaction to Romanticism used as an adjective in a pejorative sense. It then takes the GCSE Language and suggests it is on the floor, on the carpet, knocked down by some unknown force which I am about to expound upon. Or perhaps the carpet is the new GCSE Language itself, exciting and new at first, but once the Phoenix makes it a magic carpet it starts to get frayed with the children constantly having adventures with and on it, wearing it out.

I am referring to the nonsensical GCSE Language exam revision that we are seeing in a pseudo norm referenced scramble to meet the criteria in a better way than around 55% of one’s national peers. Children learning ever more complex and obscure language devices to better impress the examiner. I remember studying Parnassianism at university, its weakness and how well that resonated with me as a reader. In a nutshell, the surface of the Parnassian text is so ornate, so layered with technical features, that it obscures the actual meaning the text is trying to convey to the reader due to an opaque and impenetrable layer of verbosity. Hopkins uses it to describe competent but uninspired poetry.

I’m not alone. The Fake Headteacher posted a tweet which provoked a nerve:

This started a debate partly inspired by OFSTED’s conversion to machine learning. Is the future of English Language GCSE marking one where a machine is counting the techniques? Is this what good writing now looks like?

@_MissieBee and @joenutt_author both raise really important points. In a modern world of fake news and bot authors, we are not developing original authors. We are in effect developing bot authors. Writers whose work can be read by bots with no recognition of thought and ideas. How we can get them to appreciate the new A02 phrase from AQA ‘effects of writer’s methods to create meanings’ over in GCSE Literature if we are not doing the same in GCSE Language?