Some first thoughts on where we are with the Goldsmiths Inquiry into Antisemitism.

Just as I suspected, people have already started interpreting the KC's report into antisemitism at Goldsmiths as if it were a survey. It isn't. It's someone collecting testimony. A survey would require the methodology (a rationale for how and why the survey is carried out), in order to deliver stats and percentages.

For a start, the KC took evidence on the basis of what Jews thought were examples of antisemitism. Absolutely fine in itself - and there are plenty of horrible examples given -  but there's no indication of what is or is not representative. In order to do that, he would have had to have had some kind of census of Jews and talked to those who did NOT experience antisemitism as well as those who did.

So now we have people like Adam Wagner (also a KC) and others making comments about the extent or scale of antisemitism at the university. They have no basis for doing this.

We are also getting comments that of course Goldsmiths is antisemitic because it's run by the far Left. This is of course laughable. Anyone who knows the history of Goldsmiths over the last 5 years, will know that the left (I won't call it 'far') has been battling against management trying to save jobs and courses. We have lost at least 200 staff in the last 5 years.

Meanwhile, there remains the problem of why did Goldsmiths spend 200k purely in order to investigate one kind of racism. Goldsmiths is a diverse college both staff and students. Hooray for that. Are we to believe that Jews experience more racism than people of colour and/or any other minority? Why the 'hierarchy of racisms' (Forde Report).

The college has responded by saying that we need training on antisemitism. This is interesting. Will this include the Jews on the staff? If I have to do staff training in antisemitism will I be invited to express the kind of antisemitism that I've experienced from a member of staff whose organisation's conference was co-hosted by Goldsmiths?

It's also not clear why it is that staff have to undergo training in antisemitism, when it's management who gets a kicking in the report. And it's not clear why staff need training on antisemitism and not on matters affecting people of colour. But then the trainers would be looking at staff members of colour, some of whom teach on matters to do with racism. (This is turning into some kind of modern farce, isn't it?)

And another 'meanwhile'. The colleges boss ('Warden') announced some weeks ago that a Jewish member of staff had left on account of antisemitism. We questioned that and asked if this matter had ever been raised as a complaint. No answer. AND no mention of it in this report. So what was the basis for the Warden's comment. Perhaps she needs to do some antisemitism training to find out?



Further on Goldsmiths:

What follows here are two extracts from the Report. The first explains how the KC will take evidence. Note that we were invited to contribute if we had experienced antisemitism. We were NOT invited to contribute if we had not experienced antisemitism. This is crucial when it comes to delivering a view of the 'extent' or 'scale' of antisemitism in the university.

Note that the second extract is a comment about some Jewish students who said that they did NOT experience antisemitism.
I scratch my head at this point. Someone has been paid thousands of pounds to conduct some kind of survey of antisemitism. He makes clear that he's collecting data from people who've experienced it, doesn't invite people who haven't experienced it and yet, includes a random bit of info from some students who did not experience it.

As an undergraduate sociology essay, this would, sadly, fail.

EXTRACT 1
Scope
4.1 The following concerns fall within the scope of the Inquiry and the Independent
Inquiry Chair will undertake enquiries into these matters (in so far as they
occurred on or after 1 September 2018):
1. Whether Jewish students and staff have been subjected to antisemitism in
the course of their studies or work at Goldsmiths.
2. Whether complaints by Jewish students and staff of Goldsmiths that they
have been harassed or discriminated against or subjected to antisemitism
have been handled in accordance with Goldsmiths’ own policies and
procedures.
3. Whether Goldsmiths’ policies and procedures for resolving complaints of
antisemitism by Jewish students and staff are adequate.
4. Whether Goldsmiths has done enough to make its Jewish students and staff
(or Jewish applicants seeking to become students or staff of Goldsmiths)
feel welcome, included and safe from antisemitism.
EXTRACT 2
'I have only interviewed the College students who chose to participate in the Inquiry.
I am therefore aware that the evidence I have received and summarised above is from
a small and self-selected sample of the total student body. I acknowledge that I did
receive 4 written submissions from former students to the effect that they had not been
subjected to or heard about any antisemitism on campus despite being Jewish. '



Here's the report. Please read it. 

https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/docs/public-information/Independent-inquiry-into-antisemitism-at-Goldsmiths-College.pdf

Why do children not like writing (see the recent report from the National Literacy Trust)

We used to say to children (when it came to writing) any of the following: what do you want to say? (topic) who would you like to write it for? (audience), what kind of writing? (genre), let's find a way to share it? (brings in editing, presentation, clarification, expansion).

We used to say, 'how can we express that idea? that feeling? that place? that character's motives?' (ie how to move and interest audiences). 'Let's look at this great book. How did the writer (or the ‘text’)  move/interest you? You could have a go at writing like that too.

Now, we're supposed to say, 'Here is a topic/subject/title. If you use expanded noun phrases, subordinate clauses, fronted adverbials, embedded relative clauses, you will reach the expected level.'

So we denude writing of its prime purpose to convey/evoke/communicate feelings, ideas, thoughts and meaning. In their place, we say that 'writing is - a set of grammatical and syntactical structures.' This is 'reductive' , dehumanising and ultimately pointless.

This is why so many children come through the system saying that writing is boring or that they don't like writing. Quite right! To discover the point of writing, we need to find out what we want to say, how to say it, and to whom.

Bridget Phillipson will have received documents telling her this, as told by people with decades of experience in the classroom. Will she notice? Will she get rid of the ludicrous 'expected levels based on grammar and syntax'? What do you think?

Stories on a gravestone in Cartmel Priory, Cumbria

 On June 17  I was out and about with an old friend of mine and his wife from the days I did medicine.I was in Cumbria because I was doing my show 'Getting Through It' at the Theatre by the Lake - next to Derwentwater - a show that is about recovery from illness, loss, and bereavement. We went to Cartmel Priory which is 800 years old.

One of the gravestones on the Priory floor had the following inscriptions on it.

Here lies the Body of Robert

Harrison Son of Thomas

[?]aret Harrison who wa[ ]

drowned on Lancaster Sand

the 13th day of January 1782 in

the 24th. Year of his Age.

The waters they do compass me

And no assistance I can see

Which makes me to lament and cry

Lord send me help least here I die.

It is in vain for to withstand,

What is decreed by Gods command

My dying day I cannot shun

Farewell dear Friends my life is run.

Also here lies Margaret Harrison

who was Drowned January the

1st 1783 near the same

[ ]ce where her son was

Drowned. AE 48

From toilsome labour & from troubles pain

Beside my son I come to sleep at last.

Hoping at the last day to rise again

And be set free from all our grief & pain

----

So this tells the story of Robert who died in the sand(s) aged 24 and his mother Margaret who died in the same place a year later,. aged 48.

We can only guess that in some sense Margaret went to look for Robert, and, perhaps, wanted to join him in the hereafter. If any of that guess is right, then we might also guess that the church took the view that it was an accident, otherwise they wouldn't have given Margaret a full church burial.

My phone was out of charge so I couldn't take a photo of the gravestone but on a fascinating site called Old Cumbria Gazetteer, there's a photo of the gravestone, which I'm attaching below.

Two new poems for Gaza - a) Keir Starmer and the 'Massacre of the Innocents''; b) No Famine

 Keir Starmer and the 'Massacre of the Innocents'

Keir Starmer was asked today

what he thought about 

the moment in the Bible 

when King Herod ordered that all the male

infants should be killed.

Sir Keir was forthright in his condemnation.

He said this cannot and will not be tolerated.

One interviewer asked him 

why then had he authorised the selling of swords

to King Herod which could  then have been used

to kill the babies,

to which Sir Keir replied

that was an outrageous accusation

and that he and his colleagues had strained every sinew

to restrain Herod 

and that the record stood for itself.

Then, 

when he was asked 

whether these deaths of innocent people 

could be called a 'massacre'

Sir Keir replied, 'It's not for me to say.

and that it's not helpful to call what's been going on

“The Massacre of the Innocents”.’

And Sir Keir left to spend more time straining his sinews.

No Famine

After there are no Palestinians left

in Gaza

Prime Minister Ben Gvir will climb through

the rubble and ruins,

turn to the one certified

ratified and licensed cameraman

permitted to enter Gaza

and say into the camera,

'What famine?

There's no famine here.

You can see with your own eyes

there is no famine.'

And the fact-checkers will pore over

the footage 

and after a week of sifting through the evidence

they will announce 

that they saw no evidence 

of famine

and will therefore have to conclude

that there is no famine.

When someone points out

that if there are no people 

then it is to be expected

there would probably be no famine,

Prime Minister Ben Gvir

will say 

that this is

echoing Hamas propaganda

and is a typical antisemitic way

to undermine Israel's achievements.

There'll be headlines in the papers

expressing outrage at 

how Israel's Prime Minister has been exposed

to vicious antisemitic attacks,

and back in Gaza

(now renamed the Riviera)

the camera will pan across the scene

of wreckage and ruin

behind Ben Gvir

and close in on a crow

that seems to have found a bit of carrion

which it's tearing at with its beak

and for a split second

the world wonders if it's watching a crow

eating a dead person's finger.

Before Gove, Blunkett and Baker, there was no good research on the teaching of English...WHAT?!

One of the successes of the revolution that overtook the subject of English in schools in England from about 1988-2012, was its skill in wiping the slate clean of what had gone on previously. As an experiment, try a mind-game: what kind of research and what kind of publications (on the matter of the teaching of English) between, say, 1970 and 1980 were being produced? What kinds of discussions were going on between experienced teachers, teacher trainers and education researchers? What kind of reports were they producing? How were these reports being disseminated?

So that people reading this, will know where I fit into this, let me say I first began working in schools in 1974 either as a peripatetic writer-performer or as a writer-in-residence. Technically, I had a teaching certificate because my degree in English was awarded just before the time that there was a government requirement for anyone teaching to have either done a teaching degree or to have postgraduate certificate in education. Prior to that point, you could teach in schools if you had a degree and without a teaching qualification. However, I was only rarely asked to exercise that right, as I always worked under the supervision of trained teachers. 

In that period, I was aware, largely through my parents Harold and Connie Rosen of the work of the London and National Associations for the Teaching of English and I had an awareness of a constellation of institutions and organisations such as the London and Birmingham Institutes of Education, Bretton Hall College, the English Centre (as was), the Centre for Language (as was) in Primary Education and that there were bodies such as the Schools Council which were government funded research bodies, established by the government in order to develop English teaching. As I understood it at the time (and still do) this was a way in which interested and experienced professionals shared and disseminated expertise through papers, books, articles, conferences and lectures. Cascading (!) from this were Inspectors (HMI) and local authority directors and officers who had a lot of power to set up local conferences, develop their own structures (eg the ILEA advisory teachers' scheme), and hold competitions or local events to celebrate the work of schools and students. I found myself being part of some of these initiatives as local English advisers or inspectors ran writers like me into schools to encourage and develop writing. Since then, I've seen this as analogous to the way music education depends in part on peripatetic music teachers who are often professional musicians. 

But let's go back to my question about what documents produced by this informal constellation can you remember? My parents were responsible for producing one  of them, 'The Language of Primary Schoolchildren' (1974). And just to be clear, this wasn't simply a matter of Harold and Connie Rosen coming up with ideas out of the tops of their heads. My mother, Connie, was commissioned by the Schools Council to visit scores of schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and distill what she thought was 'best practice'. 

As I mentioned in a previous blog, another report was produced by Bernard Newsome and Margaret Mallett. It came out in 1977, and like my parents' book, the research was funded by the Schools Council and involved in their case research in 40 schools. Between the time of parents' work and the Newsome-Mallett work the Schools Council was disbanded. In the history of how it came to be that a small ministerial clique came to run the teaching of English, the disbanding of the Schools Council was one important step. 

But there's another: it's the shelving of the reports. My parents' report had a reasonable 'half-life' in that it was published by a commercial publishers, Penguin Education. However, the Newsome-Mallett report appeared in a dull edition, with an institutional yellow and black cover, with the words 'School Council Working Paper 59, Talking, writing and learning 8-13, Evans/Methuen Educational'. It's about as dull a cover as could possibly have been created. It appeared in 1977. 

I have just picked up a copy on eBay. The content is quite extraordinary. It is packed full of eg transcripts of school students' talk and writing, covering various genres of writing - accounts, stories, poetry, with detailed accounts of how teachers moved from initiating topics through visits, research, examination of texts through to outcomes in writing. There is plenty of learned commentary citing theory from a mix of linguists, philosophers, psychologists and educationists.

In another time and in another place, it would be a seminal document, showcasing wonderful work by teachers and students from all over England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It would be something to be celebrated which in turn would have enabled it to have been widely disseminated so that local authorities and teachers could have modelled their practice on any or many of the examples given in the book.

I put it alongside a book called 'Language in Use' by Peter Doughty, John Pearce and Geoffrey Thornton (1971) which also came out of a Schools Council project and was based on the linguistics of M.A.K.Halliday.  It stands in opposition and contrast to the idiocies of the SPaG/GPS test and syllabus imposed on primary schools in England for the sole purpose of testing whether teachers can teach what is a very imperfect notion of 'grammar'. 

Since the production of these three books (reports) - 1971, 1974 and 1977 - English teaching research had one late blooming with the Language in the National Curriculum Project (LINC) - and then came a set of top-down diktats from government. 

My point in talking about these three books is that when I and others have criticised what has been imposed since 1988, we've been asked, 'What do you propose?' as if we come from a tradition that is devoid of research, theory and examples. Perhaps our side of the argument has not been very good at thrusting these three books (and there are many others eg the series that came from the Open University) in front of people and said, 'These!' 

But then we come up against the question of power. I've often thought the phrase 'language is power' faulty in a variety of ways. One of the ways my reservations are exemplified is by looking at what took place in this matter of English teaching. These three books are stuffed full of language. Perhaps even, we might say that there's too much, as the seven authors did their best to explain and over-explain what their research, theory and practice were all about. Even so, all it took was for the ideological certainties of a series of education ministers  - ie the ones with political power - to wipe this body of work from the slate. It was overlooked, dismissed, ignored, wiped away. In their place came, for example, the absurd documents of the National Literacy Strategy - obsessive, anonymous, rigid courses in how to de-professionalise and demotivate teachers, tying them down to minute by minute curricula. And then we had (of course) the test-crazy Gove regime with its spurious claims about 'knowledge' mixed with nationalism as the ideological bedrock for what's been imposed on teachers and students.

I fondly imagine that at some point in the future, educational archaeologists will discover these three books, and pull them off a shelf and be amazed that such seemingly advanced thinking could possibly have existed. Perhaps what will happen is that the way education is run in this country will change, and the country will wonder how it is in a democracy, an education system can be run so undemocratically, and people will thrash around wondering if there are institutions that could be run which rise out of the collective wisdom of experienced professionals working alongside linguists, philosophers, psychologists and researchers. Perhaps someone will 'discover' the Schools Council, the LINC project and wonder why they don't have something like these in their lifetime.  

5 blogs on the Grammar test for primary school children (2022-25)

 Below are five blogs about the Key Stage 2 Grammar test for 10 and 11 year old pupils in maintained schools in England

The first four are my annual thoughts on the test itself, starting with the one given in 2022.

The last blog is my general thoughts on the test.

Terminology point: this area used to be called SPaG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) then it got changed to GPS (Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling.

I refer to the Bew Report of 2011. 

It's here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-key-stage-2-testing-assessment-and-accountability-final-report

The part that I often refer to is this passage:

'We recognise there are some elements of writing (in particular spelling, punctuation grammar and vocabulary) where there are clear ‘right or ‘wrong’ answers, which lend themselves to externally-marked testing.' (p 14, Bew Report (2011)) 

What's 'wrong' here is for the writers to claim that there are "clear 'right or 'wrong' answers" in punctuation and grammar! I show this again and again even within the narrow confines of the tests themselves, where examiners are doing all they can to eliminate ambiguity. Anyone who has written professionally, knows that there are many variations between publishing houses over matters to do with punctuation. Then, given that the GPS test tries to legislate over matters of 'formal' and 'informal' English, then again, there are many differences between publications and publishing houses over such things. 

Now for some fun: if you want to enjoy a joke, then you'll see that whoever wrote the quoted sentence from page 14,  didn't 'close the quotation marks' round the word 'right'. Lols, as my kids would say. They can't even get their own rules right! 

If you compare the final report with the interim report, you'll see that somehow or another there was an intervention between the interim report and the final report which led to the introduction of the SPaG/GPS test. I'm not clear what that intervention was or how it happened. However, at that moment, the education and curriculum for Year 6 children in England was set in stone. 

Copy and paste these into your browser and it'll take you to the blog.

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2022/06/this-years-grammar-punctuation-and.html

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2023/05/my-thoughts-on-this-years-key-stage-2.html

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2024/06/this-years-ks2-grammar-punctuation-and.html

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2025/05/this-years-grammar-test-for-10-and-11.html

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2025/06/10-points-about-primary-school-grammar.html

Bernard Newsome and this question: What else is writing other than 'grammar'?

 I've just heard that Bernard Newsome, a former colleague of my father at the London Institute of Education, died in April.

He was a friend of the family and I met up with him when I was in Australia in 1997. 

I thought I would remind myself of some things that Bernard wrote and, as these things sometimes do, it instantly overlapped with my recent concerns with the SPaG/GPS papers for 10 and 11 year olds.

One of Bernard's concerns and areas of interest was 'narrative'. If we ask the questions, 'What is narrative?' and 'How can it be taught?', we get into some interesting areas: the main one being 'narratology' - how we make stories, whether that's in writing, script-writing, film, TV, non-fiction, ballet, opera, conversation and chat and much more. It's a huge and fascinating subject which, in spite of a century of research, has hardly percolated through to primary schools. 

I've written in my booklet 'Why Write? Why Read? (available through my website) how you can analyse the opening of 'A Christmas Carol' using narratology in an age-appropriate way for upper primary and lower secondary students. Flip that on its head and you can see how you can use it in order to help students write.

What's this got to do with Bernard Newsome? Well, in looking at what he wrote, I came across this: 

Talking, writing and learning 8-13: The report of the Schools Council English in the middle years of schooling project, Goldsmiths' College, University of London (Schools Council working paper ; 59)

by Bernard Newsome and M. Mallett.

I don't have it, but I suspect it's in my father's library, so I've ordered it from eBay.

Now pause a moment. You'll see that this document came out of the 'Schools Council English'. This means that it was a piece of paid government research, entrusted to former English teachers, who (in Bernard's case) were in teacher training, in and out of schools working with teachers in schools and also through NATE and LATE. 

That's how research into writing, reading and talk was done in the olden days! Then the results of the research were disseminated, discussed, adapted and applied. Since Kenneth Baker, later as weaponised by Michael Gove, this approach was junked, and the top-down, diktat approach was adopted. That's how and why we ended up with SPaG/GPS as the overriding theory and practice for Year 6 writing in schools in England. 

So back with my question in my title. Writing is a lot more than grammar - not that you would know this from the so-called analysis of the gov.uk pages on 'exemplification' of expected levels of Dani's writing (see my previous blog for the reference) . The model there is that a teacher's job is to only look at approved structures. In other words, we have the farce that writing consists of producing these approved structures or grammatical features (though some of them are in fact 'stylistics'). 

The major absurdity about this is that there is no evidence that the person or people doing this analysis know anything at all about how to write. What a bizarre situation! People who don't do something teach students how to do it! 

However, there is a theoretical problem too: what is writing? Is it slinging down approved structures one after another? Or something else? Clearly, anyone reading what I'm writing here will be an experienced reader and you will all have had pleasure from reading. You will have absorbed knowledge from reading. You may well have had a go at writing poetry, stories, plays, scripts as well as non-fiction reports, accounts and the like. You will have read articles in the newsapers and online for fun or even for masochistic reasons, when it comes to the daily news! This means that you will have a strong sense that writing is more than grammar and approved structures.

What might we talk of in this field then? What else might be in writing that we think of as important?

Emotion, understanding, ideas, speculations, imagination, investigation, evidence, use of the senses in order to evoke and convey.

Structurally, there'll be important matters to do with 'time' which can be expressed in many different ways: present, past, flash back, flash forward, continuous, non-continuous, in sequence, out of sequence.

There'll be matters of people's motives which are spread out in what script-writers call the 'story-arc'. 

There'll be matters of how scenes build and end. 

There'll be a antagonists and protagonists either for the whole piece and/or for particular scenes. 

There'll be 'helpers' and people who are 'obstacles'  or things/objects too of course like mountains, bogs, barbed wire or bombs. 

There'll be the matter of how we reveal and conceal at the same time, as we write, a method that keeps readers wanting to know more. This will keep readers predicting and guessing. As writers,  we may want to play with this by feeding in false hopes, false plotlines, red herrings and 'McGuffins'. 

There'll be a shape overall in which we build to some kind of point or climax, though in a longer piece there may well be a false-climax, where probably we'll be disappointed that things don't work out. 

We'll want to think about how we 'thicken' or 'deepen' characters. We can do that through flashbacks eg through ensuring that motives are clear. 

Hiding behind all this are the 'intertextual' models that we adopt without knowing we're adopting them: the archetypes and stereotypes like 'rags to riches',  hubristic hero, the lost soul, the haunted, the patriarch, the matriarch, the 'golden' spoiled child, sibling rivalry, the unrequited love (and 100s more). 

There are the genres that we adopt deliberately ('I'm writing a thriller') and the genres that we may only be vaguely aware of: the adventure, the school story, the coming of age story, the buddy movie, the road movie, the rom-com. These have 'grammars' of their own which we can use, adapt, reject  or subvert.  We can even mix them up just as JKRowling did with the Harry Potter books - a school story mixed with fantasy. 

There is the matter of evidence (and illustrative prose) whether that be in non-fiction or fiction. How much, how little, why and how?

 

So, the mystery is how and why did we end up with a dry, barren set of structures as the model of how to construct narrative when we have this huge resource at our disposal, all waiting to be given to children to help them write exciting, interesting,  or accurate or well-constructed writing? 

For an answer to that question we have to look at how it was that the ideas that people like Bernard Newsome, James Britton, Nancy Martin, Harold Rosen, Connie Rosen, Jane Miller and many more people who should be on this list, were thrown out and ruled out. That's the story of how people in the education department of Conservative and Labour governments wanted to take control of 'what is English?' 

The answer to why did they want do that was made clear over and over again by Michael Gove: he understood very clearly that teaching English is political. In his case, he stated how he wanted to tie English to a national project based on a set of ideas taken from the US to do with 'knowledge' preceding competence. To get these into schools, he and his predecessors had to get rid of the old checks and balances structures in education. They worked on top-down, diktat approaches, sidelining teachers' and teacher-trainers' experience and research. 

So when a child sits down to write a story, it's not about what they want to say. A teacher is not there to show them how the writers of the stories that the children love, write. The teacher is not helped to see how  'narrative' and 'narratology' can help children write - that's that fancy French and American stuff, we don't want that, do we?! And that all  comes from what was in a sense a coup, the story of how the politicians took over the English curriculum. 

When I get Bernard Newsome's and M. Mallett's book, I'll tell you what it says.  I've already read one of Bernard's short papers on narrative and it's a lovely exposition of how you can help a child expand a narrative on the basis of how narratives are about sequences. 

If you google "Bernard Newsome" and "Narrative", you'll be taken to an entry for a PDF at the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English and a great article by Bernard called: 'The Nature and Importance of Narrative'.

I highly recommend it.

10 points about the primary school grammar test .

As a follow-up to my last post about the GPS test, I'll emphasise several things. This is in order to avoid misunderstanding.

1. My sole focus in the blog was on primary education. It's not a commentary on whether grammar should ever be taught, or when it should be taught. The GPS was devised for Year 6 students. 

2. My focus has also been on the justification for the test. It was never justified or argued for on intellectual or pedagogical grounds. I think that's shoddy educational practice. 

3. It was introduced solely on the grounds that it was necessary to assess whether teachers could teach and that this test would be an appropriate way to do it. Why? Because grammar has 'right and wrong answers'. (Bew Report 2011). This last statement is untrue. Grammar does not have right and wrong answers. 

4. Arguing about whether the grammar in the GPS is OK or appropriate is skewed by the fact that the grammar being tested has been devised so that it can be tested! In other words, there is a key problem in that the grammar is not being taught on the grounds that it  is interesting or important but that it will serve for testing. One example of this: the test is full of 'trainspotting': identifying word classes and naming them. This reduction of 'grammar' to naming terminology is of very limited use or purpose and is quickly forgotten. 

5. The test determines what is taught and how it is taught. Written English is hugely diverse. This test narrows written English to one form, and mostly to one genre. This is a misleading representation of what written English is. I have written on this blog of ways in which we live in a world with a huge variety of forms of written English. 

6. A core idea in the test is that there is some kind of concrete, measurable difference between 'formal' and 'informal' English. This is not explained or justified, and is, in many circumstances, including in the test itself, untrue. 

7. It is often stated that learning the terminology helps children learn modern foreign languages. 

a) I've never seen any evidence to prove this. 

b) there is no statutory requirement to teach primary aged children a MFL at the moment. If and when there is that requirement, we can have that discussion. 

c) it's a big leap to suggest that doing GPS in Year 6 helps children in Year 7-11 learn MFLs 

d) some of the terminology used for MFLs is different from the terminology in the GPS. One example, the terms used to describe French verbs are similar to the ones used for English verbs eg 'simple past' 'passé simple', or 'perfect' and 'parfait' but the uses or verbs forms are different. (eg you don't use the 'passé simple' in speech). In effect, when you learn this MFL you have to unlearn the GPS. 

8. This whole discussion is beset with the problem that we don't have it on the basis of talking about grammar for 10 and 11  year olds as an intellectual and pedagogical issue - ie on its own merits. It constantly starts from what is an intellectually disreputable starting-line: the GPS test. 

9. I'm 100% in favour of having a discussion about why grammar, what grammar, how grammar for 10 and 11  year olds, without reference to the GPS. I hardly ever see that discussion going on. We never seem to be able to get beyond talking about how best to teach the GPS. 

10. There is a basic principle involved in learning grammar. Do we teach grammar before, during or after 'competence' (ie how we speak and write)? The GPS has hugely overloaded this matter with the 'before'. And worse: it has interfered with the 'how' by shoehorning in the GPS grammar into the 'expected levels' of writing. There are many absurd examples of this, none so obvious than rewarding the usage of 'fronted adverbials', 'expanded noun phrases' and the like.  However, the matter is exemplified by the gov.uk exemplifications of expected levels' where a child's writing is analysed according to GPS criteria. The response by the commentator on the writing by 'Dani', hardly makes mention of what the child is writing about, what kind of effect the writing has on the reader, or indeed what it's for. In other words, writing is drained of purpose, meaning and effect. There is no better example of where all this has ended up: in a place where we talk of writing as if it is merely a demonstration of the usage of curriculum-led structures. This is an absurd and meaningless place to have ended up. 

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82d52a40f0b62305b94969/2018_exemplification_materials_KS2-WTS__Dani_.pdf