Fostering Creative Writing Skills - part 1

With a move by exam boards in the UK back to assessing skills in English in terms of grammar, spelling and syntax I am going to be placing more emphasis on this service in the coming days.

Following the disastrous years of child-centred education in this country in the 1970/80s where the liberal thinkers in education advocated a move to children setting the agenda in schools, deciding what they wanted to learn, when they wanted to learn and where they wanted to learn. It was a time of teachers being dissuaded from teaching spellings and phonics in reading. It was a time when children were engaged in a series of endless, fruitless projects in favour of separate curriculum subjects, and it was a time when desks and tables were re-arranged in classrooms such that child faced child rather than child facing the teacher, with predictable results!! It was a time of child-led lessons rather than teacher-led lessons and a time when teachers were told not to correct children's work or seek to impart too much knowledge, the belief being that children learn more, discovering for themselves.

It was a disastrous time, and the effects are seen to this day with many still struggling with literacy skills, a shortfall that has affected every aspect of their lives.

At King of the Queen's English we can help students (young and old) to recover lost time. It's not too late!