I'm pleased to announce today the setting up of the Poetry Recitation Police Department to ensure that all schools are teaching all children to recite poetry. The PRPD will be touring the streets in Poetry Recitation Detector Vans, monitoring whether schools are in fact doing what is required of them. Where necessary, they will be following children home to check that they are spending time learning poems, ready for recitation the following day.
The PRPD will be especially keen to clamp down on excessive choral work, which serves only to disguise the fact that recalcitrant and poor-performing children hide behind the more able and more willing children. The PRPD has special visual as well as audio monitors, checking on features such as lip-movements, breathing and intercostal muscle activity. In the event of children being found to be non-participants, teachers will have to undergo retraining sessions with Read Write Inc Phonics and Poetry training, as advised by Read Write Inc Phonics and Poetry training expert Truth Riskin.
In the event of underperforming performing, the PRPD have Poetry Cells waiting for teachers and pupils where a period of enforced Wordsworth is the order of the day.
The Secretary of State for Education, himself a superb reciter of hundreds of poems, a capability that has made him the man he is today, will today be inspecting the officers of the PRPD, some of whom he suspects are not themselves high-performing performers.
Ofpoem, the new poetry recitation inspectorate is already reporting a massive rise in poetry recitation standards but warns against what it calls 'low-content recitation'. Some schools, it seems, are using the imprecise wording in the new curriculum orders to ask children to recite any poem of any kind. This has led to outbreaks of filthy limericks, low playground rhymes and ditties and parodies of fine poems such as 'The boy stood on the burning deck...' As a result, Ofpoem suggests that a canon of approved poems be produces as soon as possible and the only poems that will qualify as a 'recitation' will be those poems on the approved list.
Any school not teaching children these approved poems will be reported to the PRPD who are entitled under new orders from parliament to incarcerate teachers and pupils caught reciting non-approved poems.
The BBC has announced a new TV series 'PRPD, Red White and Blue', which shows the PRPD at work in a tough inner city environment, tracking down poetry felons of all kinds. More news on this later...
