Crowdresearch Update: A (Not-So)Novel Imbalance

In the second month of our crowdresearch project, we’ve been delighted with the response to our call for volunteers!

So far, together, we’ve researched:

–       510 schools, of which 228 have provided us with concrete data

We haven’t fully validated this data yet, and there may well be some changes to our statistics once we’ve verified all of the information. However, from the data we have so far, our belief that women are not adequately represented in the English curriculum taught in English schools has been proven unequivocally. 

To date, we’ve carried out in depth research on the first 225 entries, which provides detailed year group by year group information on texts taught in 119 schools.

Out of these 119 schools:

In Year 7, a total of 178 novels are listed as being taught. 

·       45 of these novels are by women

·       133 of these novels are by men

The most popular novel taught in Year 7, with 14 schools listing it as their course text, is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The second most popular novel, with 12 schools listing it as their course text, is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. Both of these books have a majority of male characters, and both have male protagonists.

In Year 8, a total of 148 novels are listed as being taught.

·       41 of these novels are by women

·       107 of these novels are by men

The most popular novel taught in Year 8, with 17 schools listing it as their course text, is Animal Farm by George Orwell. The second most popular text, with 14 schools listing it as their course text, is Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Both of these books, again, have a majority of male characters and male protagonists.

In Year 9, a total of 117 novels are listed as being taught.

·       27 of these novels are by women

·       90 of these novel are by men

The most popular novel taught in Year 9, with 30 schools listing it as their course text, is Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. The second most popular is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with 11 schools listing it as their course text. Both of these books, again, have a majority of male characters and male protagonists.

Drilling down further into the data, we found that many schools provided a range of options of novels that could be taught, with only one of the listed novels actually being taught to each class. Once we factor this element of choice into account, the numbers look even less favourable for female writers.

In Year 7, only 13 out of 119 schools listed a novel by a woman as their single course text, guaranteeing it would be taught.

In Year 8, only 13 out of 119 schools listed a novel by a woman as their single course text, guaranteeing it would be taught.

In Year 9, only 4 out of 119 schools listed a novel by a woman as their single course text, guaranteeing it would be taught.

Women are 51% of the UK population. Yet the evidence shows us so far that their voices are hardly being heard in our English classrooms. We can’t #EndSexisminSchools while women’s voices, experiences and viewpoints are not being read, discussed and valued by our children and young people, and seen as having equal importance to those of men.

What’s next for our campaign?

–   We’ve started sending out an email to the Heads of English in schools for whom we couldn’t find data on their websites, asking them for this information, and to let them know about our research project.

–  We’re submitting a proposal to the WomenEd conference, to be held online in October 2021, where we hope to be able to share our CrowdResearch project and preliminary results with a wider audience of female education professionals.

–   We’re shocked by the lack of female playwrights on the school curriculum; so far, we’ve only found 4 plays by women being taught out of over 200 schools with data. We’re going to be publishing more findings on this soon and launching a campaign to address this: stay tuned!

–   We’re starting to put together book lists and other resources to publish on our website to support teachers looking to diversify their curriculum.

We’ve only been live for just over a month, and we’ve already made great progress. However, we need your help to enable us to reach our goal of having data from 1000 schools. Could you offer as little as 10 minutes of your time to help us continue to move forward, and #EndSexisminSchools? Contact us today to find out more!