Summative assessment: Portrait of a Queen

Summative assessment, C1. Three parts, each marked out of 20: written comprehension (40 minutes), written expression (60 minutes), oral (10 minutes per student: 5 minutes of continuous speech, 5 minutes of interaction). The final mark is the average of the three.

Formative checks along the way: the marked recap at the start of each session and the exit ticket at the end of each session.

The Queen who had to be seen

For seventy years, Elizabeth II was arguably the most frequently portrayed woman in the world. Her profile was printed on stamps and coins, her face was painted by artists as different as Pietro Annigoni and Lucian Freud, and her coronation in 1953 was the first ever to be broadcast live on television. Yet the woman behind these images remained, by design, remarkably difficult to read.

Part of the explanation lies in the nature of a constitutional monarchy. A sovereign who reigns but does not rule must never be seen to take sides. Elizabeth II never gave an interview, never voted and kept her weekly conversations with fifteen prime ministers entirely private. Her public image therefore had to speak for her, and she chose it with care.

Colour was one of her most effective tools. Her daughter-in-law explained in 2016 that the Queen needed to stand out, because crowds were often many rows deep and people wanted to be able to say that they had seen her, even if they had only glimpsed her hat. The bright coats and matching hats were not vanity: they were a way of being visible to everyone.

Some images, however, escaped her control. When Lucian Freud presented his tiny, unsparing portrait in 2001, critics were divided: some praised its honesty, others found it cruel. The Queen herself reacted with characteristic understatement, telling the painter that she had very much enjoyed watching him mix his colours. Half a century earlier, Winston Churchill had reacted very differently to Graham Sutherland's portrait of him, and his wife had had it destroyed.

Television drama has added yet another layer. The Crown, which Netflix describes as a "fictional dramatisation", has given millions of viewers a vivid but partly invented version of her inner life. Had she lived to see its final season, she might have recognised herself in some scenes and not at all in others. The real Queen, it seems, will always remain slightly out of frame.

Text written for this sequence from the sources quoted in sessions 1 to 8.

Choose one subject (300 to 350 words).

1. "A royal portrait should flatter, not tell the truth." Discuss, with at least two portraits studied in the sequence.
2. You are a journalist on 1 July 1969 at Caernarfon. Write an article about the investiture, then add a final paragraph written in 2022, looking back.
3. "Television drama rewrites history." Do you agree? Refer to The Crown and to verified facts.

Continuous speech (5 minutes). The student draws one prompt and prepares for 10 minutes:

1. A portrait of the Queen you find the most revealing, and why.
2. Colour as a royal language.
3. Duty and private life: Aberfan or the last scene of The Crown.
4. "The Crown owns half of England": myth or fact?
5. The royal family and Europe: a family tree as a map of history.

Interaction (5 minutes). The teacher plays a sceptical journalist and challenges the student's point of view.