This is a nit-pick, but a righteous one. Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for School Standards and Irony, has written the foreword to the DfE The reading framework – Teaching the foundations of literacy (I have written that as accurately as I can re-present in from the document itself) released in July, 2021.

In this foreword, Gibb has written the following inaccurate sentence:

‘Pupils who struggle to read struggle in all subjects and the wonders of a knowledge-rich curriculum passes them by unread.’

The first inaccuracy is in the absence of a comma after read and before struggle. There should also be a comma after subjects. The third error is referring to wonders in the context of ‘a knowledge-rich curriculum’ which is oxymoronic.

The rest of what he says is largely ideological drivel, and the document’s guidance is worse. There are obviously important links between reading and writing, but as evidenced for years with the actual English Key Stage 1-3 Writing SATs, Gibb’s promotion/involvement is as useless as a bag full of forgotten commas.

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With thanks: it is good of International Times to help promote my memoir. Further details here.

Some time ago I planned to write a sequence of ‘Chandler’ sonnets, written by Philip Marlowe. I recently watched Dick Powell in Farewell My Lovely, the song-and-dance man playing quite a passable Marlow – of its time – and I was reminded of those plans. I finished the first and only sonnet I had written last night, and that may be it, much as I enjoyed!

It is hot
and it is oppressive and
her hurt

needs bathing.
What can he do that he hasn’t
already?

He can take
the salt to the stairs, he
tells her –

ascending being
all in the effort to care enough
if she does.

There were times
when he carried, both piggyback
and cradled,

but those
nightmares have been subsumed by a
long and

slowed reality.
Are wounded and wound an equivalence?
She is

wound round
this cycle of pain without a balm other
than their trying.

Delighted to get a glimpse of this today.

Further details here.

…he makes a brief appearance in the memoir.

This can be ordered here.

I’m delighted to announce this pre-order of my new book planned for release on 9th August. Link is here

Drawing on Previous Learning – an ironic title – is a collection of poems I have written about teaching and education over the past 40 years. I am so pleased Wrecking Ball Press has taken these to publish.

I don’t imagine I will ever again have two books to advertise/promote at the same time (the other is my memoir Holding On To Me In Lockdown).

Lockdown has been a busy writing and organising lifeline for me.

I had my grifter time and this is recounted by one of the vignettes in my memoir. Details can be found here.

Thanks to IT and Rupert for once more giving space to a piece from my found poems sequence &there4 here.