Michael Gove has suggested that civil servants take inspiration from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, when writing correspondence. The recent invitation to compose a memo generated by either the Department of Education or the Ministry of Justice as it might have been written by a writer you would like to see Whitehall bureaucrats model their writing style on produced a large and lively entry. My head was turned by Josh Ekroy’s Gormenghast-inspired memo about prisons and Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead’s Virginia Woolf briefing on nit-awareness day. But they were outstripped by the winners below,who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch takes £30.
Brian Murdoch/C.S. Lewis
From: Under-Secretary Screwtape
Re: Stratification of Educational Assessment Procedures
Now that we have successfully imposed permanent assessment in all areas of education, His Satanic Majesty’s Service may congratulate itself upon a double impact: the irritation of all teachers at having to assess continuously not just pupils but also their own teaching (congratulations to our Semantics Department for ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’, which no-one has managed to distinguish); and the fact that in spite of frequent testing, no pupil is ever actually classified because this would be detrimental to their well-being.
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