Michael Gove’s department should take a few style tips from P.G. Wodehouse

Michael Gove has suggested that civil servants take inspiration from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, when writing correspondence. The recent invitation to compose a memo generated by either the Department of Education or the Ministry of Justice as it might have been written by a writer you would like to see Whitehall bureaucrats model their writing style on produced a large and lively entry. My head was turned by Josh Ekroy’s Gormenghast-inspired memo about prisons and Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead’s Virginia Woolf briefing on nit-awareness day. But they were outstripped by the winners below,who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch takes £30.

Brian Murdoch/C.S. Lewis

From: Under-Secretary Screwtape

Re: Stratification of Educational Assessment Procedures

Now that we have successfully imposed permanent assessment in all areas of education, His Satanic Majesty’s Service may congratulate itself upon a double impact: the irritation of all teachers at having to assess continuously not just pupils but also their own teaching (congratulations to our Semantics Department for ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’, which no-one has managed to distinguish); and the fact that in spite of frequent testing, no pupil is ever actually classified because this would be detrimental to their well-being.