Last autumn, I ordered the wondrous trove of classic novels that Penguin offered to schools and colleges at significant discount to mark the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. I had a vague plan to trawl through them to find the most exciting, breathtaking, tense, haunting, or humorous passages to engage our resit students in practising the 19-century fiction section of the Edexcel GCSE English exam.

But that plan got knocked further and further down my “to-do” list until it was forgotten and the box of books lay camouflaged among resources and stationery in the corner of the English office.

A similar conflict in priorities had started to affect my “to-read” list, too. It’s great news that we’ve moved into a period in education where rigorous research and the voices of practitioners are being given such primacy that they are beginning to undo the damage of previous decades. However, I’m not sure it’s right that teachers are giving up their weekends to attend conferences or letting their bedside pile of novels be pushed aside in favour of tomes on pedagogy.

It’s up to education leaders to seize the opportunities presented in this new era of intelligent, research-informed training and channel them into allocated staff development time. Because we’re also working in an era when it’s more important than ever for teachers to keep engaging with stories.

Imagination and dreams

Fantastica, the land of imagination and dreams in Michael Ende’s novel The Neverending Story, is almost destroyed by the nothingness of apathy and disbelief. The monster Gmork, servant of the Nothing, delights that in our world people “are convinced that it’s terribly important to persuade even the children that Fantastica doesn’t exist”.

As an English teacher witnessing the national decline in numbers of A-level literature students, and the relentless braying to uncouple level-2 English from imagination and stories, it’s easy to spot Gmork at work in the shadows, manipulating. It’s within our power to stop him though.

When I was 13, I had become too self-conscious to bring whatever sword and sorcery novel I was then devouring to the weekly silent-reading lesson that our English teacher allowed us. Seeing through my pretended indifference, she took pity and dropped a copy of Great Expectations on to my desk. It was a very different kind of book for me and I became utterly enraptured by it.

I was appalled by the heartlessness of Estella, resolving never to behave that way towards another person, although I am shamefully sure that I have. I cringed at Pip’s vanity and selfishness, and am embarrassed to know with certainty that I’ve behaved the same way. My heart broke for Joe Gargery’s friendship and loyalty, and that stays with me as a compass that I hope I follow more than I veer from.

Hope and aspiration

That’s what stories give us; hope, and the aspiration to be a better version of ourselves. Through that aspiration, maybe we are a little kinder. Perhaps a bit braver. Stories and reading develop us, and we need to ensure that our young people aren’t denied those formative, vicarious experiences.

It’s probably not fashionable to subscribe to the mission of the Victorian critic and school inspector Matthew Arnold, but it’s as urgent now as it was then. He saw it as the duty of those with the privilege of education and cultural capital to strive for equality and to make that culture relevant to all in society, not by reducing it or being selective with it, but by working powerfully to raise others up to the “sweetness and light”. In a time when, as now, some saw education for poorer children as unnecessary or even undesirable, Arnold argued that it should be compulsory and equal.

Last week I remembered the box of Penguin Classics and brought it up to the vocational faculty I was working in that day. I started to pick through it, cataloguing the titles, and suddenly felt a presence around me. It wasn’t the books. It was a growing crowd of healthcare, childcare and public services teachers, gathering around the box. I gladly invited them to browse through the books with me and soon the faculty staffroom was buzzing with talk of stories.

As ever, Wuthering Heights created a marmite divide between those attracted to its gloomy romance and those who, like me, don’t see the attraction at all. The two Janes, Eyre and Austen, were touched reverently, old favourites of many. The one non-western title, Sanshiro, provoked a great deal of interest and my own mental ‘to-read’ list was becoming intimidating. Staff were connecting with books they knew from childhood, or that they had discovered in adulthood, or that they were excited to come across for the first time.

A glimpse of the lone tower

Stepping back for a moment and observing the bustle of my wonderful colleagues, my heart soared. It felt like the moment in The Neverending Story when the heroes, fearing that the world of imagination and dreams has been completely destroyed, glimpse the lone tower, still standing, shining with defiant hope in the otherwise impenetrable darkness.

“Every human who has been here,” Fantastica’s empress tells the heroes, “has learned something that could be learned only here, and returned to his own world a changed person.” That’s why it’s so important that we don’t stop young people from exploring imagined worlds and imagining their own. What’s more, you don’t have to be an English teacher to model reading, to talk to students about books or to help rebuild Fantastica.

Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in an FE college. He is an ambassador for education charity Shine