The Head of English at a Lincolnshire secondary school discusses the crisis in education and her mission to make literature live for a new generation
Carol Atherton is shattered. Her classroom may have emptied for the day, but the final push before A-levels and GCSE exams has sent her into “marking overdrive”. Head of English at a secondary school in Lincolnshire, she has been teaching for almost 30 years and has covered largely the same set texts her entire career, but her enthusiasm for the job – and the texts – remains undimmed. As times change and new generations appear, the relevance of the poems, plays and novels doesn’t fade, it evolves.
Take today’s lesson on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), which sparked a conversation about victim blaming – depressingly still a hot topic in 2024. Tess has been raped by Alec, then has a child as a result of this and the child dies. “At the point where Alec comes back,” says Atherton, “he’s calling Tess a temptress, making his behaviour her fault and her responsibility. The students were really shocked by this.” Literature has the power to invoke empathy in ways news headlines can’t.
