Saturday 30 April 2016

Letter to the DfE

This is circulating on Facebook. It's a letter from a teacher to the DfE

"Just a quick note to thank you for your reply to my letter concerning the assessment arrangements for KS2 this year. I had, after 6 weeks, given up on on receiving a reply from you, but I'm so glad it finally came. I will be using it next week with my Year 6 pupils to develop their evaluating & editing skills. I'm sure they will easily be able to spot the 5 punctuation and grammar errors, and, as this won't take too long, I can then ask them to use the interim teacher assessment criteria to judge the level of your letter. 

As 'correct use of full stops' must be achieved for a child to be deemed to be 'working TOWARDS the expected level', they'll probably judge this piece of writing to be below this standard and therefore not "performing in relation to the national expectations".
I am not disappointed by this letter, it has saved me planning one of my SPAG lessons, and has also confirmed my suspicions that the Department for Education is not capable of meeting the standards expected of primary school children. 


Oh, and just a tiny bit of advice, if you need to print a letter out over two pages, it looks more professional if both sheets of paper are the same quality and colour."