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  • The Guardian

    ‘My spelling isn’t that great’: Michael Morpurgo on why teaching kids to love writing is more important than grammar

    May 18, 2022 5 minutes

    I didn’t love reading at all when I was young. As a teacher, I loved it, and now as a reader, I love it. But I was put off the whole idea of words very early on.

    Some years ago, I was made to do a key stage 2 (seven to 11 years old) English test. I don’t even want to tell you how I did, but it wasn’t good. I find and “subordinate conjunctions” extraordinarily abstract and difficult to get my head around. But we’re stuck in the Michael Gove era, in which children are trained in analysing language in a way that seems to me . So I was glad to discover that someone has done some proper research on this part of Gove’s education reforms; that this emphasis on grammar in primary school does not improve six- and seven-year-old children’s writing.

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