British authors rebel against test tyrants

Guardian - A group of acclaimed children’s authors including the UK’s newest Carnegie medalist Tanya Landman is preparing to contact the education secretary about the “very damaging” tendency for primary school teachers to steer children’s creative writing towards “too elaborate, flowery and over-complex” language to meet assessment criteria.

The authors, a growing group that already numbers 35, say that national curriculum assessment criteria have become a “prescription for how to teach children to write (to pass the tests), with quite adverse effects on their writing skills”. This means, they say, that children are taught “not to use simple words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘small’ or ‘big’ but to always find other more ‘interesting’ words to replace them – such as ‘wonderful’, ‘terrible’, ‘minuscule’ or ‘enormous’”.

They “are also taught never to use ‘and’ or ‘said’ if they can shoehorn in ‘additionally’ or ‘exclaimed’, and are encouraged wherever possible to use personification, metaphor, similes and subordinate clauses”, say the writers, who also include Carnegie medal winner and bestseller Tim Bowler, with other names in children’s fiction including Sophia Bennett, Mary Hoffman, Lydia Syson and Katherine Langrish.

The more complicated words are presented as “better” alternatives to children, the authors write in an open letter that they are preparing to send to the education secretary Nicky Morgan next week, so they “fail to understand the nuances of their use, and they also fail to realist that they are relatively unusual”, and that “they are used sparingly in good writing”.

Cecilia Busby, who writes fantasy adventures for children as CJ Busby, is spearheading the protest, and said her concerns about the teaching of creative writing were sparked a few years ago, when she was reading out a description of her character Sir Bertram Pendragon from her novel Frogspell to a year six class at a Devon primary school. “He is a gruff, burly knight with a deep voice and a large mustache who also happens to enjoy whacking his enemies with his big sword,” she told the class, only to be stopped by the teacher, who told her that “the word ‘big’ is one of the banned words in our classroom”.