But I query the purpose of the new "creative and transformational" writing modules of the A-level syllabus. Empathy questions are most popular in the study of history, and at primary school age they are of value. At eight or nine years, my own children spent days pretending to be Romans, and dressed up as Victorian children to spend a school day as they would have done in 1880. It brought history to life in a way my dull lessons from textbooks never did. But far more should be expected of those aged 16 plus, and I get anguished requests for help from pupils who find "transformational and creative writing" almost impossible. They are asked to take on the persona of one of my characters and write a new chapter for the novel in that guise, or else they must write a new ending, changing the story or bringing it up to date. That was my job when I was writing the book as it is my job now. But mine is not a skill to be acquired in five terms, let alone imparted by the average school teacher. The study of English literature is something quite different from creative writing and students with great academic ability often find the "transformational writing" tasks vague and frustrating. But why should they be expected to write as I write? If the pupils who find analysing a novel and writing a critical essay about it difficult are being challenged beyond their limits, then the academically able are not being challenged enough.

Iris Murdoch once told me school students should not be studying her novels, they should only read the classics, the great Victorians, the major poets - in other words, the dead. I am sure that the brightest should indeed be studying the canon, as well as some modern writers - the key words being "as well". A serious concern now is the way the exam syllabus is structured, in terms of teacher-choice. Once, it was "either Hamlet or King Lear," "The Mill on the Floss or Jane Eyre," but now it can be between, "Far from the Madding Crowd or A Kestrel for a Knave", "poems by Wordsworth or Carol Ann Duffy", and too many teachers will take the easier option - and it is easier to teach Duffy than Wordsworth, I'm the King of the Castle than Wuthering Heights. At GCSE the emphasis is almost wholly on modern writers, at A-level slightly less so, but the pendulum has still swung very far in the modern direction over the last few decades.

Teachers are afraid of their pupils being bored - or rather, of saying they are bored. But it is the nature of the teenager to affect boredom. The challenge to the teacher is to bypass that affectation and to interest, enthuse and excite. The word "relevant" rears its head a great deal, too. Modern writers are regarded as "relevant" to the interests and concerns of young people, while dead writers are not. Yet it is a teacher's job to reveal how dead authors, classic writers, can be just as relevant to their pupils, in terms of the experience of being human, of emotions felt or perceptions shared. I fear that too many teachers are themselves afraid. They are afraid of being bored and not finding books "relevant", and afraid of challenge, of complexity, of difficult language, of anything that is not immediately accessible and easily digestible. One of the reasons is that they often do not read themselves, for interest and enrichment, regularly and widely. I have despaired, going into the homes of teachers - and yes, teachers of English - and seeing no books, of talking to teachers of English and discovering that they only read the set texts of the day and have never studied anything beyond the syllabus. How can they hope to broaden the literary horizons of all their pupils if they do not broaden their own?