This is essentially a textbook aimed at those on a postgraduate certificate course. As such, it works extremely well.

Any students using it to help survive the rigours of the PGCE will undoubtedly find much to help them make sense of the year. Unlike other books aimed at this particular market, which ask beginner teachers to consider a vast array of issues, this one focuses the discussion very specifically on the demands made by the national curricula for initial teacher training.

This lends the book, to which different authors have contributed chapters, an overall coherence. But although it gains its structure from the national curricula for initial teacher training, this does not mean it introduces the assumptions that lie behind it unquestioningly.

There is much evidence of the debates surrounding the teaching of English to be found in each of the chapters. The origins of the subject and more recent battles over thecurriculum are discussed.

The arguments over the teaching of language and grammar are handled well, as is the section on teaching literature and how to assess English. There are also useful chapters on media and drama teaching.

Each of these chapters provides more than an overview of the issues. They are clearly related to practice and give useful tasks for the student to try out or research.

Part of the design of the book is to extend student knowledge and this is most evident in the chapters on grammar and language study.

But the book also has something to offer the more experienced English teacher. The chapter on assessment challenges us to consider more formative ways of assessing pupils using classroom discussion and peer assessment as a way of improving children’s performance.

We may groan in higher education that it has come to a pretty pass that we have to produce textbooks specifically aimed at getting students through the hoops put up by the Teacher Training Agency. But if all such books were as thought-provoking and imaginative at finding the spaces in which to confront the issues, we would have little to fear. Even the dreaded grids on subject knowledge at the back of the book are user-friendly. I will certainly be recommending it to my students next year.

Bethan Marshall