The author, poet and playwright on why we should move away from Michael Gove-mandated lessons on fronted adverbials and back to unleashing the creative potential of children
I didn’t love reading at all when I was young. As a teacher, I loved it, and now as a reader, I love it. But I was put off the whole idea of words very early on.
Some years ago, I was made to do a key stage 2 (seven to 11 years old) English test. I don’t even want to tell you how I did, but it wasn’t good. I find expressions such as “fronted adverbials” and “subordinate conjunctions” extraordinarily abstract and difficult to get my head around. But we’re stuck in the Michael Gove era, in which children are trained in analysing language in a way that seems to me to restrict and inhibit, rather than to encourage creativity. So I was glad to discover that someone has done some proper research on this part of Gove’s education reforms; UCL and University of York have found that this emphasis on grammar in primary school does not improve six- and seven-year-old children’s writing.
