Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England’s primary schools

Abstract

Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational linguists, there remains no detailed and critical investigation into the nature of the tests, their effects on test takers, and the policy initiatives which led up to their implementation. This article contributes to this gap in knowledge, using critical language testing as a methodological framework, and drawing on a bricolage of data sources such as political speeches, policy documents, test questions and interviews with teachers. I discuss how the tests work as de facto language policy, implemented as one arm of the government’s ‘core-knowledge’ educational agenda, underpinned by a reductive conceptualisation of language and a problematic discourse of ‘right/wrong’ ways of speaking. I reveal how teachers talk about the ‘power’ of the tests, intimidating and coercing them into pedagogies they do not necessarily believe in or value, which ultimately position them as vehicles for the government’s conservative and prescriptive language ideologies.

Learning from failure: A context‐informed perspective on RCTs

“…That is, RCTs, like other methods, are subjective in their focus, their means of implementation and the measures used (Gillborn et al., 2018). For instance, the high‐stakes SATs tests in the United Kingdom, used as an impact measure in many EEF trials, are not an objective measure of success in primary education; the SATs for English promote a view of ‘standard English’ which works to enforce ‘prescriptive linguistic ideologies’ (Cushing, 2021, p. 599). It is only with this understanding—that the commission, design, operation and interpretation of RCTs are all matters of choice—that we can fully appreciate the value of the evidence that an RCT can provide.…”

Grammar re-imagined: foregrounding understanding of language choice in writing

“…One impact derives from the Key Stage 2 teacher assessment of writing, where perceptions of what markers would reward led to some teachers deflecting attention away from a connection between a grammatical choice and rhetorical effect. Instead, they conveyed a message that "good" writing must include certain grammatical features, such as adverbials, the passive, or even more bizarrely, nouns and verbs (Myhill and Newman 2016) -a phenomenon also identified by Barrs (2019), Hardman andBell (2019), andCushing (2020b). At the same time, the reality of the national GPS test meant that some teachers deviated from the LEAD pedagogical principles to run decontextualised mini grammar lessons ; and the form-focused questioning discussed in the previous section may also have been a consequence of the GPS test.…”

Where two worlds meet: language policing in mainstream and complementary schools in England

“…However, these issues have attracted renewed attention in recent years, prompted in particular by a number of schools who have implemented so called 'zero-tolerance' and 'no-excuses' policies which are underpinned by strict systems of control, discipline, intimidation and incarceration (see Kulz 2017). Within the logics of these punitive policies lie attempts to 'ban' and erase regional dialect forms and typical fillers/discourse markers of spontaneous speech, with teachers often making intertextual and interdiscursive references to stateissued mechanisms, with pro-/prescriptive and policing practices often justified on the grounds that school-level policies are subordinated to national incentives and high-stakes assessments (see Cushing 2020aCushing , 2020b. As discussed earlier, although teachers do have power and agency within the policy making process, they are nevertheless bound to a system which can coerce and intimidate them into practices of punitive language surveillance.…”