“School has killed all of the creative spark that a lot of people - including myself - had”: An ethnographically-oriented qualitative study of Year 10 students’ engagement with, and identities, attitudes and beliefs associated with, creative writing

My doctoral research uses ethnographically-oriented arts-based workshops and semi-structured interviews to explore how 14 to 15-year-old students’ experiences of creative writing affect their authorial identities. At this level, creative writing is dictated by the GCSE English Language exam, an exam taken by all UK students at age 16, where it accounts for 25% of the final grade (AQA, 2014; Edexcel, 2022). Students are assessed based on the content, organisation and structure of the work, and for technical accuracy and the use of ‘Standard English’ (though what precisely this is remains undefined by exam boards). The shift from letter grades to numerical grades has further contributed to a culture of quantification, where students define themselves by their scores (Goodacre, 2023). The aim of this research is to answer the following research question: How do students’ experiences of creative writing affect their identities as ‘writers’, both within the curriculum and outside of it? To answer this, I designed and ran a series of six ethnographically-oriented writing workshops between January and July 2024, where my six participants experimented in genre and style and conducted three semi-structured interviews with each of my participants: at the beginning, middle and end of the study. In these hour-long interviews, participants discussed different aspects of their beliefs, identities, views, attitudes and opinions on various aspects of writing, being a ‘writer’ and on how their identities shaped their writing. I analysed the data using a thematic analysis approach, and I identified four themes in the data: writing in the GCSE English Language curriculum; the influences of identity on extracurricular creative writing; the literacies and multimodalities that students chose to engage in; and the nature of creativity and writing itself. The findings indicate a need for reform in the assessment of creative writing at KS4, prompting recommendations for curriculum revision.