Parents struggling with fronted adverbials this morning: this is not a basic piece of knowledge you have failed to learn: it’s a complex, not-universally agreed, label for an ordinary bit of language. Grammar is not ‘the basics’ of language: it’s the description of how it works.

Most people across most time have spoken several languages. They learned them without grammar or writing because people, especially children, have an immense natural capacity to learn by immersion. That capacity in is your child: read them a story and ask them to write you one.

Tweet In memory of my mother who resigned from a national curriculum committee and brought down a Tory minister over exactly this issue 28 years ago. We don’t learn.