The Government has made it its mission to “encourage a greater focus on high quality teaching” with big education reforms, including the announcement this week that all schools will be forced to become academies - but it appears it forgot to tell its own press officers.
Responding to a petition to scrap Key Stage 2 Sats tests for 2016 on the Government’s e-petition website, the department’s press officers managed to make a grammatical mistake when explaining how it wants “a more challenging standard... to reflect the high expectations of the new national curriculum”.
The statement read: “As this is the first cohort to have reached the end of the key stage it would not be fair or accurate to set the new scale using data from pupils that had studied the old national curriculum.”
Although a minor mistake, left-winger campaigner and author Michael Rosen used this to ridicule the department in a Facebook post pointing out that its own Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test guidelines say this is incorrect.
He wrote: “To be quite clear, I'm relaxed about how this sentence is written. A change is taking place in British English: more and more people are using 'that' where it used to be that we would only hear 'who'.
“However, the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar tests that children have to sit at the end of Year 2 and Year 6 demand that this should only and always be 'who' when it applies to people - like 'pupils'.”
He said if people in the department find it difficult to follow their own guidelines what chance do the pupils who are supposed to be learning them have.
Reforms by the department have come under fierce criticism over the past six years as backward-looking and old fashioned.
Changes to the national curriculum have included a new focus on rote learning and the introduction of the academically focused English Baccalaureate.
Subjects such as History have also been overhauled, with a new focus on “how Britain influenced the world” being dubbed “jingoistic and political partisan” by teachers.
The Independent has contacted the Department of Education for comment.
