Article for a book for secondary English teachers to be edited by Marcello Giovanelli
and Dan Clayton,
draft March 2015
The impact of policy on language
teaching in UK schools
Richard Hudson
Introduction
I start with a statement of the obvious: that the impact of any policy decision, taken
top-down by the authorities, will also be heavily influenced (bottom up) by the
situation that existed in schools before the change was launched. In other words,
education may allow evolution, but it can never allow revolution for the simple reason
that it has to be implemented by teachers, most of whom trained and practiced under
the previous regime. This is not to say that policy changes are a waste of time: they
can have a major impact, but only if teachers not only have time to adjust their
thinking and their practice, which may take generations, but are also motivated, either
by carrots or by sticks, to apply the new policy. The result of the change may be
different from what the policy makers had in mind; it may be ‘watered down’ (a
negative evaluation) by teachers, but equally it may be implemented in imaginative
and productive ways by teachers who find the strengths of the new policy and
combine them with the strengths of what went before to produce ‘a remarkable
melange of old and new ... teaching.’ (Cohen and Ball). In the light of this principle, it
is unreasonable to expect any policy to have the full impact intended by the policy
makers. On the other hand, we might expect policy to have some measurable impact,
so there is an important general question about how to maximize this impact. After
all, there is no point in having good policy if it has no impact.
This principle applies as clearly to language teaching as it does to any other
area of teaching, and indeed we shall see that, in some respects, recent policy has had
remarkably little effect on teaching and learning. This chapter does not try to establish
principles for language teaching (Spolsky and Hult 2008) let alone for all areas and
kinds of education (Bell and Stevenson 2006; Coffield et al. 2008; Cohen and Ball
1990) but has much more specific goals: to look at the effect of policy on one
particular area of education – language education, and more specifically, the teaching
of first-language English – in one particular country – the UK, and even more
specifically, England. Of course, it may be that some of my conclusions will
generalise, but that is a different issue.
The principle also means that history matters. If you want to implement a
policy, it is essential to understand the status quo before the policy is introduced; and
if you want to understand a policy’s impact, or lack of impact, it makes sense to look
for historical precedents. True, we can’t wind history back, so we are where we are;
but deciding what to do next requires an understanding of why we are here, rather
than where we would like to be. The search for explanation can take us surprisingly
far back in time.
Henry VIII and Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English
Seen from the 21st century, Henry VIII is surprisingly relevant, and the story of his
grammar of Latin provides an interesting contrast with more recent policy initiatives.
The facts are well known and well documented (Gwosdek). In the Renaissance, as in
the Middle Ages, the heart of education was the teaching of Latin, and fluency in both
speaking and writing Latin was the first goal of teaching. By modern standards, the
method was dreadful: the much-criticised ‘grammar-translation’ method,
concentrating on systematic and explicit learning of grammar and translation
exercises. It was because of this emphasis on grammar that schools founded at that
time were so often called ‘grammar schools’.
However, grammar teachers faced both a challenge and an opportunity. The
challenge was how best to teach the grammar of Latin to novices who knew only
English, so novices needed the grammar of Latin to be both presented and explained
in English, with the unintended by-product of an understanding of English grammar,
albeit in a heavily latinate guise. But this presupposed a grammar book – a systematic
presentation of the facts of Latin written in English. The problem was not a lack of
such books, but a surfeit: every grammar teacher wrote his own, and confusion
threatened. But technology came to the rescue in the form of printing, which allowed
the production of multiple copies – not only a copy for the teacher, but also individual
copies for the pupils. When applied to the existing multitude of hand-written texts,
inconsistencies simply multiplied and became more obvious.
The opportunity offered by printing was not lost on King Henry, keen to unify
his kingdom and to assert his power over the church (which had till then controlled
the contents of school teaching). There was one dominant grammar, which was
popularly called “Lily’s Grammar” although its author, William Lily (the first
headmaster of St Paul’s School in London), had died twenty years earlier. This
grammar already had a very high profile because of its association with prominent
scholars – not only Lily (who had introduced the teaching of Greek to London), but
also the super-star Renaissance scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote a preface
for the grammar. Henry may have actually commissioned this grammar book, but he
certainly authorised it for exclusive use throughout his realm. This was in 1542, a few
years before he did the same for the Book of Common Prayer.
The introduction of a uniform grammar for the teaching of Latin in grammar
schools by Henry VIII’s decree became part of his educational policy and a
means to ensure control over teaching in grammar schools, a privilege once
held exclusively by the Church. This measure became an important part of the
king’s political control of education and reform in the interests of religious
uniformity after the Reformation. (Gwosdek 2013)
Furthermore, Henry decreed that only one printer should have the monopoly for this
book at any one time, which guaranteed enthusiastic competition among printers for
this lucrative contract. The combination of law and commerce kept Lily’s grammar in
place as the only permitted grammar of Latin in English for an astonishing 350 years,
until it was replaced by Kennedy’s Latin Primer, which also survived for over a
century.
Lily’s Grammar was enormously influential, a clear example of policy having
a major impact on practice; for instance we know that it was the grammar from which
the young Shakespeare learned Latin (from age 7), and similarly for Isaac Newton and
William Wordsworth. This was partly because of the legal sanctions threatening any
grammar teacher who used any other book:
... we will and commaunde, and streightly charge al you schoolemaisters and
teachers of grammer [sic] within this our realme, and other our dominions, as
ye intend to auoyde our displeasure, and haue our fauour, to teache and learne
your scholars this englysshe introduction here ensuing ... and none other, ...
(Gwosdek 2013):157)
But after Henry’s death, why should a school teacher worry about his displeasure?
And why would teachers continue to favour this book in the very different political
circumstances of eighteenth-century England? The simple answer is that we don’t
know, but the publishing monopoly, which continued for centuries, must have played
a significant part, as must the simple inertia created by a firmly established text,
which allows a teacher to teach exactly as he himself was taught.
Lily’s Grammar is a model of what can be achieved given a combination of
academic quality (Lily and Erasmus), commercial pressures and political will, but it
also served as a model for the first published grammar of English (Bullokar 1586) –
another unintended by-product of Henry’s policy. Inevitably, the study of English
gradually acquired a higher profile, from being a means to the end of learning Latin,
to being an end in itself. But of course it was only in the nineteenth century that
English was recognised as a subject either at school or at university (Applebee 1974;
Hudson and Walmsley 2005). Until the introduction of universal education, including
literacy in English, the teaching of English was not a matter of public policy.
Public examinations and publishers
Governments between Henry VIII and Margaret Thatcher had a hands-off policy
regarding the content of what was taught, and to contrast themselves proudly with
more centralised education systems such as the French. Government policy tended to
control the provision of schooling rather than its content. By the early 20th century,
government policy was carried out by the Board of Education, which later became
first the Ministry of Education and eventually the Department for Education.
Although the Board did not control the content, it did take an interest in it and in 1921
it produced the first important report on the teaching of English, the Newbolt report
(Education 1921). This is a remarkable document not only for the quality of its
recommendations but also for its lack of impact, illustrating admirably the general
principle that policy needs to be supported by pressure. Here is a small selection of its
105 recommendations:
 That every teacher is a teacher of English because every teacher is a teacher in
English...
 That it is the business of the ... School to teach all its pupils to speak standard
English, and that the scientific method of doing this is to associate each sound
with a phonetic symbol.
 That the schools should not aim at the suppression of dialect, but at making
the children bi-lingual.
 That oral work is the foundation upon which proficiency in the writing of
English must be based.
 That the sounds of spoken English should be scientifically taught.
 That time might be saved in the study both of Classics and of Modern
Languages (including English) by the adoption of a uniform grammatical
terminology ...
 That during the period 16-18 some study of the growth and development of
the English language would be preferable to a course in Old English.
This document also reveals the relatively low status of English compared with science
and foreign languages, and its recommendation that this status should be raised (“That
the Senior Teacher of English should be allowed the same powers of direction as are
usually given to the Senior Teacher in Mathematics, Science or Modern languages”)
has certainly been implemented, in contrast with many of the recommendations listed
above, which are still waiting for action nearly a century later.
As for the content, this was left to two other institutions which broadly
reflected the interests of teachers and the educated public, rather than those of
government as such: publishers and the universities. Publishers saw schools as a
major market for their books, and especially for textbooks. Textbooks were typically
written by school teachers, who naturally presented a summary of what they
themselves had learned at school and university, so textbooks reflected the state of
play in universities. At the start of the 20th century, the standard textbook was by J C
Nesfield (Nesfield 1900), and contained a great deal of detail about English grammar,
combined with an extraordinarily dry summary of historical relations between English
and other languages. (Compare the comments in the Newbolt report about the history
of English being preferable to Old English.) But as the century progressed, language
disappeared from undergraduate English degrees (Hudson and Walmsley 2005) so
university influence on language textbooks also dwindled to nothing. By the middle
of the century, the market was dominated by the numerous works of Ronald Ridout,
whose 500 textbooks exceeded 90 million sales. In contrast with Nesfield, these books
presented very little systematic grammar though they included prescriptive grammar
exercises, and nothing on the history of English. As their popularity attested, they
were in tune with the mood of the time, and helped to consolidate the view that
English teachers had very little content to teach.
The other influential institution was the universities, which created and
controlled the public examinations for the schools. Since most children left school
without taking any public examination (other than the 11+ exam for entry to grammar
schools), the influence of the universities was initially confined to the academic 25%
of the population who attended grammar schools. (Although independent schools
were and are independent of government control, they tend to take the same public
examinations.) The universities set up the examination boards which from 1951 ran
the General Certificate of Education, with its exams at Ordinary level and Advanced
level and, from 1965, the Certificate of Secondary Education for the non-academic
until this was merged twenty years later with the Ordinary level exam to form the
new, and continuing, General Certificate of Secondary Education – the GCSE. The
Advanced exams continue. During this period, the links between examination boards
and universities became increasingly tenuous, so in essence it was the examination
boards, rather than the universities, that determined the content not only of the exams
but also of the school teaching leading up to them.
Of most relevance to the present chapter is the place of formal grammar
teaching in the Ordinary level English Language exam. In the early days, there was
always an optional question on grammatical analysis. For instance, the 1962 English
paper set by the JMB (one of the examining bodies) included the following questions
(Keith 1999):
 State the part of speech of each of the underlined words in the sentences below
...
 In five of the six sentences below there is an error of grammar or expression.
Write out the sentences, correcting the faulty ones as economically as
possible, ...

Make up seven sentences, each at least seven words long, using the words
underlined below as indicated. ...
 State the kind and function of each of the clauses underlined in the following
sentences, and then shorten each clause into a phrase with the same meaning
...
But thanks to a complex combination of circumstances (Hudson and Walmsley 2005),
by 1962 the teaching of grammar was terminally ill, and within the next few years
even this optional question was abandoned by all the examination boards – a change
dictated not by official policy but presumably by market pressures from the teaching
profession. At least secondary English teachers were increasingly disenchanted with
the teaching of grammar, for which they had had no training at university and which
seemed pointless; so the examination boards followed the mood of the time by
dropping the grammar question. Meanwhile, however, grammar teaching remained
popular among primary teachers so as late as 1975 a survey reported that 82 percent
of all 9 year olds spent at least half an hour per week on grammar and punctuation
exercises (Philp 1994).
It is easy to look back on the centuries of hands-off policy as a halcon period
for teachers, in which they only taught what they knew and found interesting, with
little external constraint from official policy, and generally supported, rather than
constrained, by both publishers and university-led examination boards. No doubt
reality was somewhat different, at least to the extent that a school’s senior
management would develop policy on what should be taught; and no doubt the result
of this freedom was sometimes less good for the pupils than for the teachers.
One positive aspect of this freedom from government control was the
possibility of developing innovations led by teachers. One particularly impressive
example was the Advanced-level exam in English Language, which has had an
enormous impact on the teaching of English. (A-level exams take up the last two
years of secondary schooling, as a preparation for university.) This exam started in the
early 1980s in two geographical centres, Manchester and London, each dominated by
the local university’s examination board. The underlying ideas stemmed from a
university initiative driven by two influential linguists, Randolph Quirk and Michael
Halliday, both based in UCL, who not only launched the modern study of English
language in British universities, but also saw its potential relevance for school
teachers. However it was school teachers, inspired by these ideas, who drove the new
exam from the grass roots and persuaded the examination boards to adopt it. Since the
1980s, the number of entries for English Language at A-level has increased steadily,
and in 2012 for the first time they equalled the number of candidates for French,
German and Spanish combined. The A-level course demands its own teaching
methods and knowledge base, but of course most of the teachers also teach English at
lower levels where there are sometimes opportunities for applying these skills
(Giovanelli n.d.). Paradoxically, then, what is arguably the most important positive
change in English teaching during this period happened because government policy
was to have no policy on what should be taught.
The National Curriculum
One of the most enduring legacies of the Thatcher government (1979-97) was the
National Curriculum, introduced as a matter of government policy through the
Education Act of 1988. For the first time ever, government policy would include the
content of the whole curriculum, including English – a revolutionary step indeed, and
not one to be expected from a Conservative government, least of all from one
committed to reducing the size of the state. Equally paradoxically, one of the main
achievements of the coalition Conservative-Libdem government (2010-15) has been
to subvert the revolution by allowing about half of state-funded schools (academies
and free schools) to ignore the National Curriculum.
The National Curriculum needed, and received, a great deal of careful
planning, and nowhere more so than in the subject area of English. This was
recognised as particularly troublesome, and one of the main areas of concern was in
the teaching of grammar. The government launched a series of discussion papers
called ‘Curriculum matters’, the first of which was devoted to English (Anon 1984).
This introduced the idea that English teachers should teach ‘knowledge about
language’, a phrase which triggered a great deal of disagreement. In particular, should
it include knowledge about grammar? The issue was so contentious that the
government set up two inquiries which produced the Kingman report and the Cox
report (Anon 1988, Anon 1989).
Both reports supported the general idea of teaching knowledge about
language, building on the ideas of university linguistics:
Courses should not be watered down linguistics. They should, however, be
informed by principles and insights drawn from linguistics - for example, the
idea that language in all its diversity can be approached in a non-prescriptive,
non-judgmental way and that it is possible to treat systematically and
objectively an aspect of human life which is often the focus of emotive and
prejudiced reactions. (Cox #6.13)
Moreover, they also supported the teaching of grammar, but again insisted that this
should be informed by modern linguistics:
For grammar to be of relevance to English teaching, it should be:
 a form of grammar which can describe language in use;
 relevant to all levels from the syntax of sentences through to the
organisation of substantial texts;
 able to describe the considerable differences between written and
spoken English;
 part of a wider syllabus of language study.... (Cox #4.28)
Thanks to these reports, the idea of grammar as a tool for studying ordinary language
rather than as a prescription for ‘correct usage’ has found its way into the National
Curriculum, where it sits reasonably comfortably alongside the idea that schools
should teach children Standard English without proscribing non-standard varieties.
However, the Cox report also recognises that teaching about language will not
be easy for English teachers who have themselves never received such teaching
whether at school or at university:
The kind of exploratory, data-based teaching about the forms and functions of
language which is proposed in this Report requires teachers who are confident
in their ability to handle the material and apply it to well-chosen and
stimulating examples. Our proposals therefore have serious implications for
teacher training programmes and for those who develop teaching materials as
well as for the teachers themselves. (Cox #4.27)
The Kingman report had made a similar recommendation which persuaded the
government to fund a large-scale project (Language in the Curriculum, or LINC)
which ran for three years (1989-92) and provided training for a large number of
English teachers (Carter 1996). In many ways this was very successful in supporting
major changes in the teaching of English, so that teachers became much more
confident in talking about topics such as dialect variation, historical change, genre
differences and child language. The one topic it did not address, however, was
grammar.
Another official policy decision that affected English teaching was the
decision by the Labour government to launch the Literacy Strategy in 1998 (Stannard
and Huxford 2007), which later turned into the Primary Strategy and was joined by
the Secondary Strategy before being abandoned altogether in 2011. The ‘strategies’
were nationally centralised attempts to change teaching practice directly. On the one
hand, they prescribed teaching practice in great deal (notably through the primary
‘literacy hour’, broken down into precisely timed sections for different kinds of
activity); but on the other hand the strategies also provided a great deal of in-service
training for teachers (including, in this case, a very small coverage of formal
grammar).
As for the National Curriculum itself, since its launch in 1981 there have been
four different curriculum statements for English, but all of them have included some
grammatical knowledge. For example, the 1999 version includes this:
Language structure
7. Pupils should be taught:
a. word classes and the grammatical functions of words, including nouns,
verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles
b. the features of different types of sentence, including statements, questions
and commands, and how to use them [for example, imperatives in commands]
c. the grammar of complex sentences, including clauses, phrases and
connectives
But – and this, I shall argue, is a crucial gap – until recently there was nothing in
official policy to persuade teachers to comply with the curriculum. What if teachers
were not ‘confident in their ability to handle the material’? Why should they expose
themselves to ridicule from possibly better-informed students by teaching grammar?
In summary, the National Curriculum has had a major impact on what teachers
are expected to teach, which is now much clearer and more uniform than it used to be.
And thanks to the many major changes mentioned earlier – the A-level in English
Language, the LINC programme and the Primary and Secondary Strategies – most
primary teachers and some secondary English teachers have much more confidence in
handling knowledge about language in its less technical aspects. But formal grammar
is still work in progress.
A number of research reports suggest that secondary English teachers,
typically trained in literature, remain to be convinced that they could or should teach
grammar (Watson 2015, Giovanelli n.d.). They doubt their ability to teach it because
they themselves have never been taught grammar; but they have also heard many
negative things about grammar being dry, difficult, incompatible with creativity and
pointless, so they also remain to be convinced that grammar deserves a place in the
curriculum alongside literature. Fortunately for these teachers, it is easy to avoid
grammar altogether in secondary English, because there are no public tests of their
pupils’ knowledge of grammar, nor do school inspectors check on whether it is being
taught. With so few incentives to bite the bullet, it would not be surprising to find that
the official policy has been quietly ignored. And this does in fact seem to be the case,
to judge by an audit of the grammatical terminology known by school leavers in 1987
(just before the National Curriculum was introduced) and later repeated in 2009
(Alderson and Hudson 2012). This audit consisted of a very simple test in which
incoming first-year undergraduates were asked to find examples of various named
grammatical categories (e.g. ‘preposition’ or ‘auxiliary verb’) in a presented sentence.
The results showed that school leavers actually knew less grammatical terminology in
2009 than their counterparts had known in 1987, which suggests strongly that at least
that part of the National Curriculum had had absolutely no positive effect at all.
But the latest version of the National Curriculum (dated 2013) is different.
This puts even more emphasis on grammar, thanks to a three-page appendix on
grammar for primary schools, and an associated fourteen-page glossary. But crucially
it has been introduced at the same time as the ‘SPaG test’ – a national test of spelling,
grammar and punctuation. This is currently taken by every pupil in Year 6, and in
2017 a similar test will be taken by every pupil in Year 2. This is partly a test of
practical skills but it also tests explicit knowledge of grammar. Because this is a
national test, and each school reports its results to government, schools for the first
time see a practical benefit of teaching about grammar. And because there is now
strong evidence that explicit discussion of grammar improves children’s writing
(Jones, Myhill, and Bailey 2013; Myhill and Jones 2014), teachers see the educational
benefits.
Between them, the new curriculum, the SPaG tests and the new research
underpinnings for grammar teaching seem to be having a noticeable effect on English
teaching. To judge by comments and discussions among teachers, children are leaving
primary school with a significant amount of grammatical knowledge; and publishers
are investing in grammar courses for secondary pupils. An optimistic grammarian
could reasonably hope that sensible grammar teaching is on its way back. On the
other hand, there are still serious impediments to this change: secondary English
teachers are still by and large both anxious about grammar and reluctant to teach it;
university degrees in English still ignore language; English teachers still do not
collaborate with their colleagues in foreign languages, where grammatical knowledge
is an obvious shared topic and resource; and of course official policy can change with
the colour of the government. So nothing can be taken for granted in the area of
grammar teaching.
I have focused on grammar because this is such a clear example of how
government policy is just one part of a complex of teacher knowledge and attitudes,
the sticks and carrots of exams and the economics of publishing, so policy alone may
have very little effect on teaching. Creating policy is easy, but (in the absence of a
king’s dreaded displeasure) implementing it is very hard.
.
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