Every day of teaching my kid at home makes me hate Michael Gove more. This syllabus reeks of him. He is killing the joy of creative writing for a generation. I am teaching my child that writing is a rigorous, clinical ordeal, and not a way of expressing emotion or ideas.

Instead, we have to make up arbitrary sentences using connectives or fronted adverbials. I have never known what these things are, and it hasn't impaired my career as a writer. And I watch my child sit miserably, fulfilling what to him feels like a series of arbitrary commands.

I feel for every teacher obliged to enforce this horrible, joyless agenda. It's like teaching cooking theory, and explaining the properties of gluten before they're allowed to play with dough or taste freshly-baked bread. They don't care. It has no currency for them.

Why on earth should a seven-year-old care what a conjunction is? We've done nothing to illustrate its value to them. We haven't given them any sense of why writing should feel valuable. It's just a revolting, dictatorial series of instructions.

I know a lot of people tend to think that their upbringing was the best because secretly they think they're the best and so the system that produced them must be the best system...

...but with all the advances in child educational psychology, surely we must allow ourselves to be informed by that data? We have an obligation.

Yet again, I am troubled by the fact that we are led by a government comprised of adults who, as children, were generally sent off to boarding school and told to toughen up, and basically had a miserable childhood. They came away from their youth with some terrible scarring...

...which has led us to the parlous state we're in, of social nihilism, of winning-means-everything, of being brave and hard lines.

In short, fuck all this.
Ok, sorry, thanks.