The reason why Year 6 children in England 'do grammar' is nothing to do with 'grammar'! It's entirely to do with the government deciding it had to assess teachers.

The piece of official writing that I'm referring to in this post, is at the bottom of the post. It comes from the Bew Report (2011) and is available online. I haven't made it up!

The people who decided that children in Year 6 in schools in England would 'do' grammar, did not decide to do so for reasons to do with 'grammar' nor to do with children. It was not a decision made because teachers, or advisers, or researchers sat in a room and thought it would be a good idea to do grammar for reasons to do with language, writing, linguistics, children's development. The reasons were entirely to do with a government trying to work out how to assess teachers and teaching. They wanted a tool to do it with.

If you think I'm being too political or too conspiracy-theorist about this, then please let me draw your attention to one part of one paragraph in the Bew Report of 2011 (see below). It's available on the gov.uk website. In this piece of the report you can see clearly that this huge change in the Year 6 curriculum was made purely and only in order to assess teachers - yes - but in itself, it was based on a total fallacy: that 'grammar' has right and wrong answers.

Digression: there are various ways of describing language (ie how we speak, write - and to a certain extent - think.) There are several, if not many, grammars. There is also the fact that we do grammar without anyone describing it anyway, just as the landscape does landscape without geographers describing it.

Some grammars are flexible, tentative, open to possibilities and which accept that human language is part of human behaviour and so frequently defies being tied down to simple categories.

So the 'grammar' that the government chose to implement is one specific form of grammar. It is rigid. Some of it is based on out-dated terminology. Some of it isn't even grammar (eg 'synonyms). Some of it is disputed (which in itself is no bad thing, precisely because some language production (ie how we use language) can't be tied down. )

As I've mentioned before, one example of all this is 'tense'. As a word, it is used to refer to the idea that a specific 'verb form' like 'I am going' is attached to and expresses a particular time frame. In this case, the 'present'. You know that, without me telling you that! You say every day things like 'I'm going to the shops' and so 'am going' helps you say that you're doing something now. So grammarians (who noticed that Latin does the same sort of thing) called it the present tense (though in this particular example they distinguished between 'I go' and 'I am going' and called the first the 'present tense' and the second 'present continuous'. People who have to teach Year 6's now, will notice that they have to call it the 'present progressive'. That's because grammarians form into terminology camps. Spend a few minutes online and you can find that terms used for parts of speech vary all over the English-speaking world. So the claim that 'grammar' produces right and wrong answers is false even on those grounds alone. The universal ways or terms for describing language have long lost their universality, or were never there in the first place. Spend some time looking at how to describe 'my' in 'my Mum', for example!

Back with 'tense': you'll know that you can say and probably do say, 'I'm going out tomorrow'. 'Present progressive', surely. But 'tomorrow' indicates that this about the 'future'. In other words, the sentence as a whole indicates 'future'. And yet it uses a present tense. How come? Because grammar doesn't have right and wrong answers. And because the terminology needs to be more flexible. Perhaps it would be more useful to ask, 'how do we express time through language? Sometimes we can do it through verb forms. Sometimes we do it through combinations of words as with this example - using 'tomorrow'. In other words, we need a description that is fit for purpose and not a rigid one that doesn't allow for what we really say, write and think.

People who've had to 'do' this grammar and the absurd test in May of Year 6 also notice that there are questions in the exam that express certainties about language which aren't there. In the first year that they implemented the exam, there was a question to do with putting an 'adverb' (a term that is long past its usefulness anyway) in the clause 'The sun shone [....]' There was a choice of words, I think. The 'right' answer was 'brightly'. The wrong answer was 'bright'. Just say to yourself, these two alternatives. You may remember the song about the moon shining bright on Charlie Chaplin. Anyway, the linguist David Crystal wrote to the examiners and told them that 'bright' was a valid answer. Of course, they ignored him.

Yesterday, I posted here, a discovery I made that on the government's own website where it is trying to say, in effect, 'this is how you write well, using the grammar that we tell you to teach', they can't get it 'right' according to their own rules.

So, the apparatus is at fault. It's been brought in on the premise (the sole premise) of assessing teachers. It's not been brought in because it's valid in itself. Here's the part of the para from the Bew Report (2011). Please distribute it as widely as you can. There is a new government in power. It might just be faintly possible that someone 'up there' will listen to this argument.

The Meteorite Gove hit schools and left this kind of chaos (and wrong advice) for children on how to write.

 As teachers know, a crazed and obsessive meteorite-like thing hit schools in around 2010 and schools have never been the same since. It was called Gove. One thing that Gove did was switch the idea of writing from being something that is 'about' something, to being 'how you write'. However, the 'how you write' was a paraphernalia of old-style grammar, much of it altered and refined by people over the years, though these alterations and refinements are mostly ignored by this SATs 'grammar'. There are also parts of the 'grammar' curriculum that aren't anyone's definition of 'grammar' eg the requirement to answer questions about 'synonyms' (which serious linguists think don't exist, anyway!). This is all part of the Gove that hit Year 6 children in schools in England.

One result of this was the government put up examples of 'good writing' that children had done, on their Gove.uk website. (Sorry, gov.uk website). These are analysed (in terms of this old grammar) so that teachers can tell their pupils what to include in their writing. As I said, it's about 'how' to write, not about 'what to write'. The examples below come from 'Teacher assessment exemplification: end of key stage 2'

One problem, the people who've done the analysis of these examples (presumably not Gove as the Gove landed and then disappeared according to that old government principle of Dump and Run - see David Cameron for another example) is that they get the terms wrong! They've labelled the bits of sentences (that they think help children write, and got the terms (as according to them) wrong. I'm not bothered but I just happen to know the terms because I was taught them back in the Stone Age when I was at school and have also kept up with what they teach Year 6 children now.

So here we go: take a look at this (below). However, please don't 'correct' the spelling in the writing they're analysing. That's from the child's own writing.

In short, what they call a 'subordinate clause' is not, according to their own terminology, a 'subordinate clause'. What it is, can be much disputed of course! Some call these things an 'adjectival phrase', or an 'adverbial phrase' or a 'participial phrase' depending on which side of the moon, you can see, on that particular night.

What's really sad about this is that for all the footnotes and comments littered all over the page analysing Morgan's piece of writing, there isn't a single comment that says whether the writing is exciting, or intriguing, or interesting or full of tension or some such. In other words, a child gets the message that writing isn't about writing something that we care about emotionally, culturally or socially in any way. It's about 'getting it right' according to a scheme of 'rightness' that the people forcing this stuff on to us, can't even get 'right' themselves. [If you find these too small to read, just click on them!]