Ofsted yesterday published its latest report on the government's national literacy and numeracy strategies. David Bell, chief inspector of schools, warned that the government will continue to miss its primary school improvement targets. The report points out that eleven-year-olds' English scores have been stuck at 77% (reaching national targets) since 2000. Bell claims that the main reason for this is that "too many teachers still had too poor a grasp of English and Maths to help struggling pupils." The chief inspector called for more training for teachers to boost their subject knowledge and teaching techniques.

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/publications/inde...summary&id=3442

It has just been reported that Becta has just negotiated a new deal with Microsoft. According to the press release schools will be paying between 20% and 37% less for licences, saving them around £47m in total. I know little about software prices but is this really a good deal?

I respond to your literacy comments with interest as an Australian teacher watching from afar. It is interesting to see the number of ads in our newspapers for teachers for England, particularly the London area. What is happening? Why can't the UK education system supply teachers? Are conditions so bad that few want to teach?

In Australia we are being chastised by government groups and the media alike for literacy and numeracy standards. I must admit that over the past 10 years, of the 6 student teachers I have worked with only one has been "grammatically correct". (In fact one was so "interesting" as to not know the names of the few rivers we have in Australia and to make several mistakes with the names of our few states and capital cities.) But she was out teaching secondary geog and English the next year.

As I listen to the news reports on the TV I cringe at the incorrect sentences. Can only my 48 years hear them? Advertising prides itself on imaginative spelling. So how do we teach our native speakers the difference, let alone migrant or second language learners?

Can't resist but to add that it is too hot here to think much more than my next glass of chardonnay.

PS Where is the spell checker?

The English Language changes all the time. Swift and Johnson recognized this. There are standard forms, but they are not fixed forever. If they were, our language would ossify. Happily, real speakers keep breaking the rules, and new forms emerge.

Of course, these things can strain our tolerance. A few weeks ago the Queen, introducing the new parliamentary session, spoke of "upfront tutition fees". I suspect that she has never willingly said "upfront" before. In her mouth, the word sounded incongruous.

Teaching has become unpopular in England. It is not too badly paid, but in a booming economy, able people can choose alternatives. The conditions of service are not good. Perhaps the greatest disincentives are of the state's own making - all sorts of assessments, league tables, performance management. The previous government brought most of these in, but the current Labour administration has done nothing to undo that damage so far. Culturally, teaching is still subject to ridicule in popular representations.

Younger teachers may not know all sorts of information that was more or less obligatory in past times. I have heard staffroom conversation in which various teachers tried to outdo each other in boasting of their ignorance of science and maths.

The comment of inspectors about the proportion of students who attain targets is simply idiotic - it is they who do not understand maths, or human nature. And it's daft to blame the practitioners, rather than the system or its architects. Our National Literacy Strategy was supposed to work this miracle. In response to understandable public scepticism about the accuracy of assessments in which pupils' scores kept improving, the examining watchdog authority tightened up the criteria. And then, unsurprisingly, the scores stopped getting better. (Some of these guys still think they can have it both ways. They might as well tell all the children to grow tall and have blonde hair...)

Microsoft's pseudo-bargain is maybe a sign that they can see the need to lose their arrogance in telling us how we will spend our money. There are excellent Open Source alternatives, like www.OpenOffice.org, that are free to the end user. If we use these, then we can ensure that all students and parents have the same software as the schools. And save money to spend on other things.

I trained as a teacher at Goldsmiths' in 1976-77 and worked in the UK for three years as a secondary school teacher of English. In other words, I've missed out on the National Curriculum, targets - even on having a set number of working hours per year.

I've been teaching abroad since 1980 more or less continuously, and I'm often asked if I'd ever go back to teaching in the UK. My response has always been "No Way!" My principle objection is probably the nit-picking controls which British teachers seem to be subjected to … but if I had stayed in the UK the choice of staying in the profession would almost certainly have been out of my hands. In my estimation, I'd have been sacked around 1985 for questioning targets, written lesson plans, the school prospectus or any of the other millstones around the necks of British teachers.

However, the factor which is perhaps most influential in my not coming back is the feeling of being a 'persona non grata' for the people running the system. Where I work now, I am treated as a professional who can be trusted to have a great deal of control over his daily working life. I'm expected to work to professional standards, and to cooperate and collaborate with colleagues. I'm also expected to work openly and to participate in external reviews of my work. However, this takes place without my being treated as basically a suspect character who needs to be monitored all the time …

Regarding the National Literacy Strategy see:
Heather Rendall TES Online, 12 October 2003
"We need to talk: Is everyone using the same grammar terms with pupils at KS2 and 3? Heather Rendall sounds an alert for MFL and English departments"
http://www.tes.co.uk/online/
(A search of the archives under "Rendall" will locate the article for you.)

This was also the subject of a lively debate in the Linguanet Forum some time ago:
http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum
One debate centred on the way tenses in English were described in the National Literacy documents.

It was felt by MFL teachers that whoever drew up the National Literacy documents did not have a clear understanding of the grammar of their mother tongue. We found many blunders, most of which have now been corrected.

To cite a couple of examples from Heather's article:

1. The following appeared in one of the NL documents:
"Adjectives have different degrees of intensity: nominative names the quality (tall)."
WRONG! The term "nominative" applies to the case of a noun not an adjective. The term "nominal" is usual in this context - contrasted with "comparative" and "superlative".

2. It was stated in one of the NL documents that the apostrophe plus "s" derives from "his", e.g. "the man's dog" was originally "the man his dog".
WRONG! Every teacher of German knows that the apostophe plus "s" in English derives from the Saxon genitive.

When British kids write "I might of known" and "Your the one", it's obvious that they don't understand the grammar of their own language. Is the National Literacy Strategy doing anything to improve things? TV and radio presenters don't help. They are always making mistakes.

I must admit that I learned more about English grammar from my German teacher at school than from my English teacher. My German teacher was the local Delphic Oracle concerning all aspects of grammar in German and in English.

"When British kids write "I might of known" and "Your the one", it's obvious that they don't understand the grammar of their own language. Is the National Literacy Strategy doing anything to improve things? TV and radio presenters don't help. They are always making mistakes.

"I must admit that I learned more about English grammar from my German teacher at school than from my English teacher. My German teacher was the local Delphic Oracle concerning all aspects of grammar in German and in English."

I don't read it this way. British kids writing 'I might of known' are reproducing a sound they've heard. I think you'd need a lot more evidence to draw the conclusion that they don't understand the Perfect nature of the construction 'might have'. In other words, this could well be a spelling problem rather than a grammar problem.

In Sweden, Swedish pupils still spend a lot of their time parsing Swedish. Swedish teachers will still tell you that "you have to know the [metagrammar] of Swedish in order to be able to learn foreign languages" - a highly debatable proposition that's easy to refute, that is, if you can get it to make sense at all. The metagrammatical term in Swedish for the tense used in the phrase "I ate" is 'imperfekt'. The Swenglish confusion is between the phrases "I ate" and "I was eating". The French equivalent of "I ate" has part of the verb "to have" in it, and is called "passé composé" or "parfait" in French, whilst the equivalent of "I was eating" is called "imparfait" in French. Hm … looks like an (imperfect) 'knowledge' of Swedish grammar is more of a hindrance than a help.

The problem, in my opinion, is in the idea that you only 'know' your own language if you can parse it. When I first arrived in Sweden (and hardly knew any Swedish) I enrolled in a secondary-level Swedish class for Swedes. We had grammar tests all the time, and I (not speaking Swedish) would typically get 100%, whilst my Swedish colleagues averaged around 30%. The tasks were all of the form "underline the 'bisats'". As soon as I'd worked out that a 'bisats' is a subordinate clause, as a language teacher I didn't need to understand the words in order to be able to identify a subordinate clause. It's a pretty strange test of knowledge which 'passes' the person who can't speak the language and fails the people who've been speaking it ever since they could speak.

After a school year of this, it was very interesting seeing what the effect of being taught Swedish was on my Swedish classmates. Their self-esteem got lower and lower for one thing, as you might expect. As an English teacher in the UK, I learned how dangerous it is to imply that a native speaker is making 'mistakes' in the way they speak or write. It's almost impossible to separate "you said that wrongly" from "you are wrong as a person". In those situations, you were nearly always talking about sociolects, and I saw my job as expanding my pupils' command of the various sociolects in the UK, rather than as criticising the particular sociolect they used most of the time.

You can probably imply from my comments here that I think that teaching the metagrammar of English to native speakers of English is pretty ill-advised. You might be able to get your pupils to see the exercises as increasing their understanding of the structure of their language - if you're lucky. This is all very nice and fine … but I fail to understand what it's got to do with something you could call a national literacy strategy. The most likely outcome, however, is yet another attack on their self-esteem.[QUOTE][QUOTE]

Perfect grammar may not always be necessary, but the blunder I came across the other day demonstrates why a good basic understanding of the language does help.
In an official DoE (Tasmania) document was this delightful statement:
Employers should always provide a suitable area for breastfeeding employees."

I am currently enjoying reading "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." It's a wonderful collection of the sort of thing mentioned above.

Not long ago, in a novel I was reading, I came across another wonderful example of why a spell checker is of little use if you don't know the context:

"He sighed deeply as he slowly entered the French widows." Half their luck, say I!!!

David writes:

I understand exactly what you're saying - this is a key issue for teachers of foreign languages. My point, however, is that there is a difference between the way you look at a first language and the way you look at a second language. Native speakers already 'know' the grammar of their native language - it's just that they don't express it in metagrammatical terms. And the problem is that the metagrammatical terms used are usually not quite adequate to describe the way a language really works.

Let's imagine you work for a company which has just changed its corporate image. You come to work one day and find that you have to wear a shirt and socks which are a hideous shade of lime-green. The company cars are all to be resprayed in the same colour.

Using conventional metagrammatical terms, these are a shirt, socks and a car which are green. I.e. 'shirt' is the noun and 'green' is the adjective describing the noun.

However, to take the example from John Holt's 'How Children Fail', isn't it just as likely that we real human beings think in terms of a 'green' (noun) that is 'shirt', 'socks' or 'cars' (adjective)? In other words, even a metagrammatical concept as basic as 'adjective' doesn't have a fixed meaning. We just happen to have decided that certain words are going to be called adjectives, whether or not the definition fits each particular case. ('Adjective' as a metagrammatical concept came on the scene quite late, by the way - for the Romans they were 'adverbs'.)

I'm not surprised that teachers, pupils and educational administrators prefer the false certainties of the National Literacy Strategy - it's a lot easier than dealing with reality. My reading of the 77% 'success rate' is that you can get most people to give whatever answer you have decided is 'right' if you hammer away at it enough … and the 23% 'failure rate' would represent where the limits of the irrationality of the National Literacy Strategy run.

I know that UK teachers are stuck with this system, as most Swedish teachers are with a system which describes English grammar in wondrous ways for Swedish pupils (although that situation is rooted in praxis in Swedish schools, rather than government directives). What I often say on in-service training courses is "that's OK - it just means that there'll always be a job for someone like me putting your pupils' English right, once they've left school!"

Scott Thornbury in 'How to Teach Grammar' (Longman) has a very clear discussion of the issues involved. He describes what he calls the 'A' Factor and the 'E' Factor as useful tools for deciding when and how to teach grammar.

The A Factor is 'appropriacy' and the E Factor is 'efficiency'.

Thus, to go back to the 'might of' example, an assumption that a native-speaker pupil producing that form didn't understand the way perfect tenses are used would definitely not be appropriate, unless the same pupil produced utterances like "I of read that book". Seeing the use of 'of' as a 'spelling' problem is perhaps more appropriate, whilst giving them root and branch instruction about perfect tenses would probably only confuse them more.

You could teach your pupils the phonetic script and then take them through the patterns of assimilation and reduction in English … but that wouldn't be very efficient, since they basically 'know' their own language.

Besides which, an understanding of the principles underlying this problem is something which takes place in the conscious mind, whilst the production of the 'wrong' form is an unconscious process.

Yes, David, all very valid points but...

Just to nit-pick: The “have” in “might ‘ve” sounds different from the “have” in “I’ve read that book”, so it’s not a fair comparison. You hear a schwa before the “v” in “might ‘ve” but only a “v” in “I’ve”. A better example for comparison is “would ‘ve”, where you also hear a schwa before the “v” – and, yes, I’ve seen “would of” written down too. You don’t have to resort to phonetic transcription either. All you have to do is point out that writing “of” is wrong because it should be the verb “have”, which sounds a bit like “of” in spoken English when it is shortened to "'ve". You don’t have to go into a lengthy explanation about tenses and the differences between verbs and prepositions at this point – but it depends on how much your learners are capable of assimilating or want to know.

The National Literacy Strategy came about because of the appalling lack of knowledge about grammar among English children. I take your point about the metalanguage of grammar. I would not automatically expect an 11-year-old to understand terms such "subordinate clause" and "unattached participle", but the situation with which I was confronted as a secondary teacher in the 1960s and 1970s was that most children entering the school did not know basic grammar, such as the difference between a noun and a verb. I therefore had to explain what a noun was before I could give them a general rule about nouns in German beginning with a capital letter. I found this irritating as it was a waste of time and, in common with many teachers of Modern Foreign Languages, I felt that English language teachers in primary schools should have done a better job.

The situation got worse in the wave of the trend not to mention grammar when teaching modern foreign languages. As a teacher of German in higher education in the 1980s I was then confronted with 18-year-olds who did not know the difference between a noun and a verb! Somehow or other they had muddled through secondary school without having a clear idea of the very basics of grammar. We therefore had to take remedial action. My approach was to use a range of computer programs rather than waste classroom time. I recall one 18-year-girl coming up to me after using a set of programs concerning word order in German, notably the "main verb second rule". "It's brilliant!" she said, "I didn't realise it was that easy." None of her secondary school teachers had ever explained to her that there is a basic rule - and it is a fairly rigid rule - concerning the position of the main verb in a sentence.

Surely one needs to ask why teachers do not "do a better job" of teaching English grammar. In the 50s I was taught grammar systematicallyand thoroughly. So why did things change so much by the time my sons were being educated in the 60s and 70s?

My reasons would include:
1. The advent of TV and consequently less need for the necessity to read and write
2. The broadening of the curriculum with less time for formal subject study
3. The introduction of the whole word/look and say methodology which believed that immersion was all that was needed
4. The Dr Spock/flowerpower era of bringing up children to choose for themselves what they though important and ignore the rest
5. The subsequent deterioration of children's behaviour which turned much teaching into a babysitting exercise
6. Comprehensive high schools with unstreamed classes which make it well nigh impossible to teach something so complex in an effective and systematic way

No doubt I will get shot down in flames for this last one, but I still believe it to be true. Also, remember that even in the 50s there were still a great many students who left school with little formal knowledge of grammar. You probably just didn't know them or didn't go to the same school!

In my experience of teaching in both streamed and unstreamed situations over 35 years, it is not necessarily the actual streaming that does the harm, but the wrong teacher for the group. I think this is to some extent what you are saying.

I have seen "bottom" groups taken by poor teachers who cannot get the best out of them, and by "academic" type teachers who thought it was beneath their dignity to teach them properly. I have also seen them taken by empathetic, well-trained teachers who got more work out of them than could ever have been achieved in a mixed group. It's HOW you do it, and with what mind-set, that matters.

I've been wondering why I still get the feeling that Graham and jaywalker are barking up the wrong tree … and why the National Literacy Strategy seems stuck at around a 75-80% success rate. I have a strong feeling that the reason goes right back to the start of the National Curriculum and the (I hate to use the term) political situation which existed after 1979 - which I'm sure sounds like ancient history to most UK teachers now.

I was a newly-qualified teacher of English in 1977 and worked as an English teacher until 1980 in north-west Kent (of all places). I trained at Goldsmiths', though, and did my TPs in places like Peckham - and Blackheath, so I had quite a rounded education during my PGCE year.

I've been trying to square the picture of a 'qualified' teacher of English grammar with the kind of background most of my English-teaching colleagues came from. I was unusual, since my first degree is in Philosophy and Politics, which included some very rigorous courses in subjects like formal Logic. Most of my colleagues had degrees in English Literature, rather than Applied Linguistics, so they were often worse off than I was when it came to analysing how the language worked outside of a literary context. As I understand it, this is still the case. Lower school teachers don't fit this picture, of course, since in my days most of them followed B.Ed. courses on which they received an extremely good grounding in subjects such as the way that human beings learn to read.

I remember well the immense amount of pressure Mrs Thatcher's government was under in the early 1980s. Nearly everything they had touched had turned to dust - the economy was in shambles, and in those days people could see very clearly how public services had deteriorated sharply (I feel that lots of people in the UK have become used to poor schools and clogged road, etc nowadays). Since lots of people have children, the deterioration in the state of schools was most marked, and subject to a lot of criticism. I remember how the cleaning regime in my classroom went down from 'floor swept every day - washed every week' to 'floor swept every week - washed every month', and how broken windows were replaced with plywood to save money.

I also remember the strength of the government's alternative explanation: that the poor state of schools was due to the inadequacy of the teachers, rather than to the cuts. And the two subject areas first in the firing line were History teaching and English teaching. The attack on History was focussed on the need to teach children how marvellous the British Empire was. The attack on English was, I remember, much more visceral and atavistic - this was the subject that was bringing everything else down.

At the same time, teachers of 'native-language studies' have one of the least well-defined subjects in the whole school to work with. At least with History you have dates vs. social and industrial trends to argue about, but what exactly is it that is the subject matter of English Language?

When I was training at Goldsmiths' we spent a lot of time working out what our role was as English teachers. Nearly all the strategies that worked had a 'political' dimension - our job was to teach our pupils to think, and to express themselves in their mother tongue, both practically and creatively. This is my explanation for the virulence of the attack on English teaching - we had a government and, specifically, Ministers of Education who didn't particularly want pupils to learn to think, but rather to obey and to accept their place in society.

It's very easy then to construct a new 'subject matter' (such as parsing) which has nice neat right and wrong answers (which unfortunately happen to be largely irrelevant to the whole subject of teaching pupils to think), and to put a lot of pressure on English teachers to avoid an exploratory approach to their subject in favour of a prescriptive one.

And, as I've said in a previous post, I think that 77% represents about the limit of how far this approach can be pushed. At the same time, I'm full of admiration for the rearguard action many English teachers have fought over the years to preserve their subject - it's just such a shame they have to waste their time on diversions such as the National Literacy Strategy.

Thanks for the parsing site. It'll definitely come in useful to our linguistics students.

I didn't mean to imply that Thatcher's lot invented parsing! I was at school just as the parsing era was ending, but, fortunately, I missed having to sit an O Level which included it.

The formal study of parts of speech is definitely something I'd recommend to teachers of foreign languages. My point is just that I question how useful the practice is for native speakers of a language.

One exercise I use with teacher trainees to get them to analyse the language before they try to teach it is with the 'used to' construction. Calling this a 'defective verb' is a useful bit of shorthand for language teachers, but I wouldn't recommend using this terminology with learners. Learners need to develop an unconscious grasp of the fact that 'used to' doesn't have a present tense (which the Swedish equivalent does), but my aim as a teacher of beginners is precisely to divert them away from thinking too deeply about its defectiveness … otherwise they fall straight into the trap and produce utterances like "I usually played ice hockey, but I don't now" (a straight application of the Swedish construction).

Sorry wrong URL! My paper is at:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/worldgd1.htm
not
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/wordlgd1.htm

All very enlightening about parsing, but to get back to the original topic, I'd like to point out that here in Australia where we have not suffered from the Maggie era and do not have a National Curriculum or literacy/numeracy strategies, as a country we still perform well on the PISA scales.
I taught in Britain in 91/92 and have kept in contact with what is going on ever since, and it does seem to me that in Britain teachers are not permitted the same amount of professional judgement as here and the curriculum is overly prescriptive.
Our curriculum is much more outcomes based, relying on teacher judgement of content to reach those outcomes, although subjects such as history do still have a set content. I think we tend here to do a reasonably good mixture of the formal and the "creative", in response to student needs within a particular classroom. From what I hear UK teachers saying on the TES website, that is not always possible for them.

The problem starts with the requirement in the National Curriculum to teach "knowledge about language" rather than models, or theories.

It gets worse when the models derive from the discredited tradition of Bishop Lowth, so that mistaken ideas of word-categories from the Latin-fixation of the Augustan age are imposed on our Germanic language.

And then the strategy is broadcast by recycled teachers who are meeting this stuff for the first time, and mostly don't begin to understand it.

Some years ago, I sat, in a meeting convened by my school managers, to listen to the literacy consultant for East Riding primary schools who was informing our collected staff about the mysteries of language. I was dozing off when I was jarred awake by her reference to the "subjunctive tense". But I realized that any attempt to explain the distinction between time signals and verb moods would be a waste of breath among my fellows, who, while unable to follow the account closely, appeared to have faith in its accuracy.

There is a fundamental problem in the name. I think that, in most parts of the world and in most ages, literacy denotes the ability to read. The National Literacy Strategy uses a secondary or metaphorical sense (as we do when we talk of media-literacy - understanding how it works).

It has the kind of doomed arrogance of the Academie Française - attempting to impose by fiat what can only emerge from informed debate in pursuit of a consensus.

It also represents the first attempt ever by the British state (but not in Scotland) to assert by authority what language is - the folly of enchaining syllables, which Dr. Johnson ridiculed. Meanwhile, whatever the government says, people will use language as they choose, like the wonderfully crude speech-writer who had the poor old Queen referring to "upfront tuition fees" a little while ago.

Absolutely!

And then you have the problem with the word 'understanding'. Do we 'understand' how to breathe? Well … in one sense we do, since we breathe all the time. And breathing is obviously essential to being able to stay alive.

In another sense, most of us don't, because we have no idea of the physical and psychological processes which govern breathing.

Do we all speak grammatically correctly? Well, again, obviously we do, since other native speakers understand what we say.

And then again, we don't, since people's 'language' is always being criticised, usually on aesthetic grounds ("I don't like the way you speak"). And most native speakers couldn't explain how their native language 'works' any more than they could explain how they breathe.

Do you have to have an explicit knowledge of anatomy in order to be able to breathe? And do you have to have an explicit knowledge of one of the various metaphors which describe how English is supposed to work in order to be able to speak it?

Now you could argue, as does the National Highways Authority in Sweden, that the person who can't explain how a carburettor works does not have the knowledge necessary to become an authorised driver. Other people (like me, for example) say that this is a "category mistake". (Excuse a diversion into Philosophy) Professor Gilbert Ryle's classic category mistake was the Indian who was shown around the Oxford colleges, and finally asked to see the famous 'Oxford spirit'. The category mistake was thinking that the Oxford spirit was something that could be shown to a visitor, in the same way that King's College Chapel can be shown to a visitor.

My position boils down to this: the National Literacy Strategy will only work if category mistakes stop being category mistakes. Since this has conceptual thinking against it, I'm not holding my breath!

I came across an interesting article in today's Guardian by Philip Pullman which I'll have to quote extensively from in my next post in this thread, because the link isn't working!

I find it hard to understand why teachers in the UK are still 'teaching' parsing and calling it 'English'! I know there's heavy government pressure, but what happened to professional standards?

As I've mentioned before on this thread, this is what happens in Sweden with the Swedish language. The net results, in my opinion, are 1) that Swedes generally lack self-confidence in using their own language; and 2) they have a very vague grasp of their own culture, since they spend so much time parsing in Swedish lessons.

This is my explanation for the fact that Swedish culture is becoming rapidly Americanised … which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself (since cultures do what they want) … but is perhaps not what Swedish teachers in Sweden intended should happen!

Common sense has much to learn from moonshine

It's time English teachers got back to basics - less grammar, more play

Philip Pullman
Saturday January 22, 2005
The Guardian

The report published this week by the University of York on its research into the teaching of grammar will hardly surprise anyone who has thought about the subject. The question being examined was whether instruction in grammar had any effect on pupils' writing. It included the largest systematic review yet of research on this topic; and the conclusion the authors came to was that there was no evidence at all that the teaching of grammar had any beneficial effect on the quality of writing done by pupils.

Needless to say, this goes against common sense. That particular quality of mind, the exclusive property of those on the political right, enables its possessors to know without the trouble of thinking that of course teaching children about syntax and the parts of speech will result in better writing, as well as making them politer, more patriotic and less likely to become pregnant.

For once, however, common sense seems to have been routed by the facts. If we want children to write well, giving them formal instruction in grammar turns out not to be any use; getting them actually writing seems to help a great deal more. Teaching techniques that do work well, the study discovered, are those that include combining short sentences into longer ones, and embedding elements into simple sentences to make them more complex: in other words, using the language to say something.

A word often flourished in this context by the common sense brigade is "basics". It's always seemed curious to me that commentators and journalists - people who write every day and who presumably know something about the practice of putting words on paper - should make such an elementary error as to think that spelling and punctuation and other such surface elements of language are "the basics". These, and deeper features of language such as grammar, are things you can correct at proof stage, at the very last minute, and we all do that very thing, every day. But how can something you can alter or correct at that late point possibly be basic? What's truly basic is something that has to be in place much earlier on: an attitude to the language, to work, to the world itself.


And there are many possible attitudes to take up. There are some that are confident and generous and fruitful, and others that are marked by fear and suspicion and hostility. We instil these attitudes in children by the way we talk to them, or the fact that we don't, and by means of the activities we give them to do, and the environments we create to surround them, and the games and TV programmes and stories we provide them with. The most valuable attitude we can help children adopt - the one that, among other things, helps them to write and read with most fluency and effectiveness and enjoyment - I can best characterise by the word playful.

It begins with nursery rhymes and nonsense poems, with clapping games and finger play and simple songs and picture books. It goes on to consist of fooling about with the stuff the world is made of: with sounds, and with shapes and colours, and with clay and paper and wood and metal, and with language. Fooling about, playing with it, pushing it this way and that, turning it sideways, painting it different colours, looking at it from the back, putting one thing on top of another, asking silly questions, mixing things up, making absurd comparisons, discovering unexpected similarities, making pretty patterns, and all the time saying "Supposing ... I wonder ... What if ... "

The confidence to do this, the happy and open curiosity about the world that results from it, can develop only in an atmosphere free from the drilling and testing and examining and correcting and measuring and ranking in tables that characterises so much of the government's approach, the "common sense" attitude to education.

And the crazy thing is that the common sense brigade think that they're the practical ones, and that approaches like the one I'm advocating here are sentimental moonshine. They could hardly be more wrong. It's when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won't make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.

Take the national curriculum. The authors of the York study remind us that it lays down that children aged five to seven "should be taught to consider: a) how word choice and order are crucial to meaning, the nature and use of nouns, verbs and pronouns" and so on; that children aged seven to 11 "should be taught word classes and the grammatical functions of words, including nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles", as well as "the grammar of complex sentences, including clauses, phrases and connectives ... " Think of the age of those children, and weep. It simply doesn't work.

What does work, the York study maintains, is writing in a meaningful context: writing as a practical hands-on craft activity. One of the implications of this is that teachers have to be confident about writing - about play, about delight. Too many are not, because they haven't had to be; and the result is the dismal misery of the "creative writing" drills tested in the Sats, where children are instructed to plan, draft, edit, revise, rewrite, always in the same order, always in the same proportions, always in the same way. If teachers knew something about the joy of fooling about with words, their pupils would write with much greater fluency and effectiveness. Teachers and pupils alike would see that the only reason for writing is to produce something true and beautiful; that they were on the same side, with the teacher as mentor, as editor, not as instructor and measurer, critic and judge.

And they'd see when they looked at a piece of work together that some passages were so good already that they didn't need rewriting, that some parts needed clarifying, others needed to be cut down, others would be more effective in a different order, and so on. They'd see the point of the proofreading, at last; and they'd be ready, because they were interested, to know about subordinate clauses and conjunctions and the rest. The study of grammar is intensely fascinating: but only when we're ready for it.

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility. If you love something, you want to look after it. Common sense has much to learn from moonshine.