English Career Resources

Key Stage 3: Personal statements in fiction

(Career Education Guidance Objective 1)

The first Key Stage 3 target for Careers Education requires students to 'undertake a realistic self-assessment of their achievements, qualities, aptitudes and abilities and to present this in an appropriate format'. In school, students of ages 11-14 might be asked produce a personal statement to accompany annual subject reports or they might undertake a review with their form tutor or mentor. Personal statements are often an integral part of PSHE.

"Please sir, don't know what to write about!"

The production of a personal statement is usually part of a review where students are asked to stand back from themselves to identify their achievements, skills and qualities. Many students find the process of self-review quite challenging – and not especially interesting. One of the difficulties is that students think they have done nothing worth recording. Of course, students are usually well aware that when they construct a piece of writing they need to have a clear idea of who the writing is for – the audience. Creating a personal statement does not immediately identify an audience – although we can suggest that it might be for the student, the teacher, an employer, the parent? And then there are those abstract concepts – achievements – skills qualities – what do they mean? Finally the actual task of drafting the statement might take place in the form room, at home or even on the bus to school.

Class texts as real contexts

The English teacher can offer both a context and support for the process of writing a personal statement. The real strength for English teaching is that the statement can be explored by using characters from a text read as part of the English curriculum. Macbeth's 'My hopes for 10 years from now' section might contain such gems as: "I hope to have settled down as King of Scotland and to have a son and heir to the throne" or: "I need to employ some more reliable political advisers and arrange planning meetings at a five-star hotel rather than that blasted heath!"

Sample tasks and approaches

This unit on personal statement writing within the English class text takes as its example the novel 'Skellig' by David Almond. However, all the tasks and approaches could equally well be applied to any novel, play or poem being studied in a Key Stage 3 English lesson. In fact, you will find a list of commonly-used Key Stage 3 texts which will provide excellent contexts for writing personal statement.

There are three stages in the process of writing personal statements for fictional characters.

• active reading to retrieve and record relevant information from the text
• interpretation to analyse and sort the information
• writing to re-present a character through a personal statement.

Have a look at Mina McKee's Personal Statement (PDF) to see what kind of challenges it presents to the young writer!

Why write personal statements?

During Key Stage 3 pupils will be asked how they see themselves performing in different subjects, and sometimes there will be a formal statement drafted which outlines what a pupil has learned and what needs to be improved – and this often includes attitudes as well as skills and knowledge.

Personal statements are likely to reinforce cross-curricular links. But, using fictional characters as a focus provides a powerful opportunity for the English teacher to help students to get 'under the skin' of fictional characters. Significantly is also offers them a purpose for undertaking close re-reading of texts. It also enables students to model their own personal statements on the evidence drawn from texts.

Finally, there is no reason limit the work to the characters. English HMI have argued for years that students should know more about the writers behind the texts they study. Why not get students to research the author and then write their personal statement which will show how they came to write in the first place?

For more information, go to the Resources Chart which suggests books, authors and characters.