Poets protest as Shakespeare is compulsory but poetry is optional at GCSE next year

Leading poets including poet laureate Simon Armitage have joined former children’s laureate Michael Rosen in criticising Ofqual, England’s exam regulator, for making poetry an optional part of the GCSE syllabus for next year’s students.

Exam boards will be asked to change their assessment criteria for GCSE English literature next summer, so that students will be assessed on a Shakespeare play, but will only have to focus on two out of the three remaining areas – poetry, the 19th-century novel, and fiction or drama from the British Isles after 1914.

Ofqual attributes its decision to “difficulties for students in trying to get to grips with complex literary texts remotely”.