Status Anxiety: Grammatic irony

I received a shocking letter from a 15-year-old schoolgirl called Carola Binney last week. It was a real marmalade dropper. In all my years I’d never seen anything quite like it. Had she really spent the past 11 years in full-time education? It scarcely seemed possible, not at a British school. To my astonishment, all the words were spelt correctly and it didn’t contain a single grammatical error.

Earlier this week, the CBI disclosed that 44 per cent of businesses are forced to provide school and college leavers with remedial English lessons, so poor are their writing skills. British schoolchildren simply aren’t taught grammar any more, a deficiency that isn’t confined to the state sector. Barnaby Lenon, the headmaster of Harrow, told me that when he first took up the job he found that an alarming number of his sixth-formers were illiterate, including those who’d got an A* in GCSE English.