Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty
Today's Ofsted report, with its criticism of the content rather than the calibre of poetry teaching in our schools, at last articulates concerns arts professionals have been expressing for years. Poems are undoubtedly used throughout our school system - especially in Key Stages One and Two - to encourage language and literacy skills; in ways which make meaningful contact with a range of curricular subjects; and with proper attention to technical detail. Light verse accomplishes many of these non-poetic purposes as well as any other genre. But until education theory asks itself what poetry itself is, and therefore what the teacher is trying to get across, poems will continue largely to figure as teaching aids, exercises and - for teenagers - increasingly tedious, somewhat arbitrary puzzles whose role is to raise pupils' scores in public exams.
A poem isn't an educational device, however much can be learnt from it. Nor is it simply a particular pattern of rhyme and metre. Poetry, in every era and culture, has operated as a heightened discourse, more pleasurable - beautiful, memorable, imaginative, disobedient - than the daily. It has always been the language of ritual and liturgy, of song and special occasion. These things seem almost too obvious to say. Yet they're not evident in contemporary British educational thinking.
Why does this matter? One, utilitarian, response would be to say that it's because, as child-centred learning demonstrates, a young (or for that matter an older) person learns more of what they enjoy, and learns it "better". Another is that such sources of pleasure - complex ones, not the single-pointed pleasures of the chip-bar in the canteen - are essential in the shared, public environment which is a school.
Like many of my contemporaries, everything I use and love in my working life came to me from outside the home. I must be among the last products of that great post-war educational revival informed by pioneers like the artist Robin Tanner, or musicians using the Hungarian Kodaly method, who believed that the whole person must be developed if the pupil is to flourish as a citizen. Poetry - the real thing, in all its red-in-tooth-and-claw excitement - affords complex pleasures, such as the concatenation of sound and sense, which model and enable just this kind of development. And young people are engaged by those very qualities which "make poetry work" beyond the classroom: mystery, glamour, the space to dream.
One morning in Ysgol Cwmpadarn, when I was six, Mr Griffiths read the opening of Under Milk Wood to us. I understood practically nothing - and I was blown away. It's this way of understanding poetry our educationalists need to master: perhaps in dialogue with arts professionals. Work in health and social care and prisons demonstrates how - certainly among people with a long-term history of educational "failure" - complex, rich poetry is consistently more accessible than light verse. One produces a polite laugh of disengagement; the other, attention, emotion and "ownership". Let's hope that's not too risky a mixture for the classrooms of Britain.
