ABSTRACT
Many politicians and journalists were ignorant about the problems in the teaching of grammar and about the status of Standard English, and simply desired to reinstate the disciplines of study typical of schoolrooms in the 1930s. Responses to the Sir John Kingman Report from the English teaching community were varied. The genesis of the National Curriculum for English can be most obviously traced to the earlier years of the Conservative administration, however. Even as the first version of the National Curriculum was being implemented in schools, and then being recommended for seemingly instant review, the Language in the National Curriculum Project (LINC) was in process. The dual weapons of curriculum and assessment, reinforced by an increasingly oppressive accountability framework manifested in school league tables, performance targets and Ofsted inspection, threatened for many English teachers what they considered to be the good practice that had evolved through previous decades.
