The numbers don’t make for pretty reading. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of students studying English literature at university fell by a third, and the decline has continued. Across UK universities, undergraduates studying any type of English degree dropped by 19 per cent between 2019-20 and 2023-24.
English literature A-level, the precious pipeline feeding universities, has also withered, falling out of the top-ten most popular A-levels in 2022. In the summer of 2025, 112,000 students took maths A-level, compared to just 58,000 who did English. Joanna Burton, head of policy for higher education at the Russell Group of 24 leading universities, told The Times: “A decline in the uptake of English A-level in recent years has had a knock-on effect on degree numbers.”
Blame is cast widely: our addiction to screens, the collapse of reading for pleasure and the rising cost of higher education. As journalist James Marriott writes in his Substack essay, The Death of English Literature: “£9,535 per year to acquire a finer appreciation of moon imagery in DH Lawrence is a hefty ask in the present economic climate.” Students are opting for degrees with clearer career pathways such as economics, business, maths, engineering and medicine. Ten years after graduating, engineers earn on average £20,000 more than English graduates (£54,800 versus £34,300). One English emeritus professor told The Times he felt “despair” that “a subject I considered as important as a religion is now apparently failing the marketability test”.
Article continues belowAnd there is anguish and confusion, that what Marriott calls the “prince of the humanities” has fallen so far. English literature was once the most prestigious of degrees, freighted with intellectual ambition. Yet even my own children describe their experience of the subject as “lame”. So where did it go wrong?
‘A hollowing out of content’
Elizabeth Stone, Headmaster of Winchester College, points to fragmented attention spans. “The idea that you have to sustain focus for an extended period of time to read a short story, let alone a novel, is going against all the circumstances in which our young people are now living. They are swimming in different waters,” she says. Children might spend as much as six to nine hours a day on screens, consuming mostly short-form video in formats that are typically 25 to 30 seconds long.
“In an environment where they are spending hours every day training their mind to be highly distracted, is it any wonder they struggle with the long cross-country run that reading a novel requires?” she asks. “That quick hit is just antithetical to reading.”
While this fragmentation is global, Stone is also critical of the UK’s English literature curriculum. “The way children are asked to study English can quickly become pedestrian and formulaic,” she says. Teachers tell her that teaching excerpts rather than whole texts is the most efficient way to prepare students for exams. There is “a hollowing out of content to make it teachable”.
She dismisses claims that the English literature GCSE is dominated by ‘irrelevant, dead, white men’ as “rubbish”. She vehemently believes that Shakespeare, Goethe and Voltaire are for everyone. “They have endured because they speak to deep universal truths.” To argue that anybody cannot access them due to their age, gender or skin colour is simply “patronising”, she says. She does think, however, that “some resonance is needed” and supports a mix of classic and contemporary writing, insisting students should encounter texts that reflect their own lives.
Her deeper concern is structural. We are in an environment when every course ends with “a high-stakes exam assessment”, she says. The result is a “reverse engineering – what you test for gets taught”.
Within the current system, it is easier in a subject such as maths or physics to come up with a clear and precise definition of what the answer is. If you are preparing a child for a public examination “your job is to be very definitive – that really impacts the ways these things have to be taught”.
In English, subjectivity complicates matters. Stone references a 2018 report by Ofqual which revealed marking in English literature across GCSEs, AS and A-levels showed a roughly 50 per cent agreement rate with ‘definitive’ marks.
“To my knowledge nothing has been done to address that,” she says. “Students might look at that and think, ‘you know what, if I put the same level of effort into economics, I can predictably get a decent grade but in English it’s 50⁄50’. That’s a really important factor.”
‘An economic case for the humanities’
Matthew Oliver, head of English at Bede’s in East Sussex, agrees that career utility is central to the subject’s decline. “When we are charging students for degrees, it’s quite natural that they will be making pragmatic and economic decisions.” English teachers, he says, must “make an economic case for the humanities”, but also persuade pupils of the wider benefits of studying English literature.
“If one believes that the sole purpose of education is to enable you to get a job that earns you over £100,000 a year very quickly then, possibly, English literature would be seen to be a very limiting degree – if that is your sole measure of success.”
Literature is “almost designed to be difficult”: complex, demanding, and no longer the primary way “we communicate ideas about culture and society. The reason to choose a book needs to be asserted more strongly.”
And schools have to offer a combination of the best of traditional classical literature and cutting-edge contemporary literature, says Oliver. “All English teachers would make a case for why we need to teach Shakespeare or the 19th century novel – but I also must insist that we need to teach very contemporary texts: we need to see literature as offering a response to a world that we live in now.”
To demonstrate the subject’s career relevance, Oliver invites alumni into classrooms to talk about how “communication and the handling of language is so central to many professions”. Recent guests have included a lawyer who spoke of “the absolute centrality of handling nuance, of being able to think critically”, a STEM policy advocate explaining how funding depends on persuasive writing, and a marketing professional setting real-world communication challenges. Oliver also approaches guests from all over the world who have done an English degree to talk to pupils about their careers. An amazing array of guests has joined pupils online, including a Guardian journalist, a Michelin-starred chef from Spain and a fashion writer from Shanghai.
“All our students are seeing there are many routes that English can take you,” says Oliver. He believes engaging pupils with English begins with relationships. Teachers at Bede’s are expected to recommend books personally to each pupil – gift-wrapped novels are common. “That for me is the measure of a good English teacher – do you know your pupils well enough to recommend a book to them?” says Oliver. Small class sizes are essential and at A-level, students receive Oxbridge-style one-to-one supervisions where they are expected to discuss and expand on their independent coursework assignment. And all students are encouraged to debate, perform and write creatively. “I want to look at the room and make sure I am engaging everyone in some way,” Oliver says. This term, his class is staging a 1990s acid-house version of “Henry IV Part I”, with Falstaff in an Adidas tracksuit.
Oliver thinks the complexity of literature can be a draw if taught well. The danger, he says, “is reducing the text to some information. It isn’t solely information – it’s teaching us about the complexity of being human.” Students are often “stunned”, he says, by a writer who has found “the most fitting expression possible for a complex and knotty human feeling.”
There is a gap between what we can feel and how we can express it, he says. “If we can close that gap so we become proficient and confident in expressing what we really feel, does that make us lead better lives? I think it does.”
And one of the real advantages of independent schools is having freedom to design a curriculum. “I get to choose what we study,” says Oliver.
While Oliver believes the “canon is still relevant as an idea”, he thinks some exam boards have been “quite narrow at GCSE” and wants to teach the best of literature in English – whether that’s a Nigerian novel, an American play or a text in translation.
“We must give the sense that literature is still being written about the world we live in now,” he says. So, if his pupils are studying the urban poverty of “Jane Eyre” or “David Copperfield”, Oliver might also get them to read “Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart or “Only Here, Only Now” by Tom Newlands.
“What I insist upon is the freedom to combine what we believe to be the best of our canonical classical texts with something that is contemporary and brilliant. I think that combination is incredibly powerful.”
The real sweet spot, he says, is when “a canonical text strikes a particularly contemporary and timely note.”
For example, he says, “‘Henry IV Part I’ – it wouldn’t necessarily strike anyone as a text to talk about contemporary Britain, but if you are talking about masculinity, about privilege, about morality – we could do a lot worse than start with that play.”
It’s the freedom to choose a text or a play that is so vital, says Oliver. When we can “make an informed choice that suits our moment, our purpose, our cohort – that’s when it ignites that passion in pupils.”
‘The only way to live other lives’
At Highgate School in north London, there is plenty of passion for English literature. Odette Orlans, head of English, notes that children arriving in Year 7 “used to come in excited by English and stories – now their experience is learning things like fronted adverbials”.
“We should start with joy,” she says. “Every child loves being read to. Prepping for any test can take the joy out of something.”
And there is clearly immense pleasure in learning English literature at Highgate – numbers of A-level students are steadily rising every year, and students go on to read English literature at Oxbridge year after year.
Highgate achieves this by making reading “a whole school focus – it’s a consistent message pupils are getting from everywhere, not just the English department”, says Orlans.
For example, the Head always gives book recommendations in assemblies and ‘Highgreat Reads’ are prestigious school reading lists. A place on these lists is hotly fought. ‘Book Battles’ will take place between pupils and teachers who fight for their book to be included and the gathered assembly gets to vote which title gains a place on the hallowed list.
The Lyttelton Competition, a poetry declamation prize, is one of “the most prestigious in the school”. Every child in the school must enter with the 20 finalists performing at an evening finale event. “It’s a big deal,” says Orlans.
The school has also resisted individual screens for pupils – unlike so many other independent schools. “So we’ve never had that fight on our hands,” Orlans says.
“Screens have their place,” she says. She loves being able to show NT Live in class, and moments such as “listening to Virginia Woolf’s voice on YouTube” is “incredible” – but the default is pen and paper.
“I think it’s amazing. I don’t want to be teaching classes where pupils are on screens.”
But Orlans also believes that the reason so many pupils are excited about English literature at Highgate is quite simple: “We choose good texts and we teach them well.”
At GCSE, teachers can choose to teach “what they are passionate about and what will work well for their class”. There are some strictures in place. “We say they must do a play, a novel, a collection of poetry and we say that one of those set texts has to be by a woman,” says Orlans.
“We teach in a co-ed school and a co-ed world – study must reflect that.”
At A-level, “we try to mix things up”, she says. Students have to study works by women and non-white authors alongside canonical texts on the Eduqas syllabus.
Orlans is not anti the canon – far from it: “It’s cultural literacy,” she says – but thinks it’s important to broaden study, too.
A-level coursework pairs pre- and post- 2000 novels; students recently studied Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” alongside Andrea Levy’s “Small Island”, and Orlans is currently teaching “Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf alongside Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and The Sun”.
It’s clearly an engaging mix for students, aided by frequent theatre trips. “We often choose to teach a play based on what is on in London,” says Orlans.
Among the many stories Orlans relays of visiting authors, essay writing competitions and lively lunchtime literary debates, one moment captures the spirit of English study at Highgate. While studying Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse”, a Year 12 class recreated its famous big dinner party scene down to the food, characters and costuming – and not one script, but two. The first read-through was Woolf’s words; but the second? Their own script of what was meant but left unsaid in that iconic modernist scene. If that isn’t excitement about literature, it’s hard to know what is.
Winchester doesn’t even do English GCSE. “We do it in an unexamined way that really makes literature sing,” says Elizabeth Stone. All Wykehamists study ‘Div’, an unexamined inter-disciplinary humanities curriculum with literature at its core. Div is timetabled throughout a Wykehamist's school career – at A-level it is the equivalent of an additional subject. “It is a deep commitment to deep thinking,” says Stone.
Pupils all study English literature “for the love of it, with freedom to immerse themselves without being skewed by the narrow demands and pedestrian edicts of an exam board”, says Stone.
“Importantly”, she adds, students read whole novels. And there is a wider spread of content; this year’s sixth formers are studying Chaucer alongside contemporary writer, actor and comedian, Tom Basden – “developing cultural literacy and broadening intellectual awareness and connecting texts with art, religion and politics.”
When the school trialled GCSE English literature, “the only tangible effect was that the children who had done English literature GCSE chose the A-level in significantly smaller numbers”, says Stone.
“Div is so spiritually liberating,” she says. “We see it as a point of distinction; it is the mark of the Wykehamist that they are original thinkers.”
And originality is needed at a time when top grades alone no longer distinguish students. “The exam arms-race has maxed out. You have to bring something different to the table,” says Stone.
But literature should never be only about employability. “Children are more than economic units,” Stone says. “We want them to flourish and come fully alive.” In a largely unchurched generation, books offer a space to explore meaning, empathy and identity. And what better medium to do that than through the words on a printed page. “It’s like dreaming with your eyes open – the only way to live other lives,” says Stone.
If English literature is to survive, it may be by reclaiming precisely that truth.
This article first appeared in The Week’s Independent Schools Guide Spring/Summer 2026, edited by Amanda Constance.