In Competition No. 2909 you were invited to follow in the footsteps of Michael Gove, who has urged civil servants to take inspiration from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, and submit 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 correspondence on.
It’s a squeeze this week, so I’ll hand straight over to the worthy winners below who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch takes £30.
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.
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