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. He now makes all the pupils in the Lower Sixth sit a basic literacy test.

To give you an idea of just how lax standards have become, take the following example provided by Andrew Penman, author of a book called School Daze. In the summer of 2008, a GCSE English paper asked examinees to describe the room they were sitting in. One candidate gave the following two-word answer: ‘F*** off.’ The exam board in question, Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, awarded him two points out of a possible 27. Justifying this decision, a spokesman for the board said: ‘It does show some very basic skills we’re looking for — like conveying some meaning and some spelling. It if had got an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more.’ Never let it be said that you don’t get additional points in GCSE English for good punctuation.