The headlines are alarming, and we should be alarmed. Scottish children’s grasp of the English language is diminishing year on year. This trend is exacerbated not only by the increasing use of mobile phone messaging shorthand in public exams but also by the “positive marking philosophy” of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA).

This is not the opinion of some crusty old professors, still in mourning for the days when all lessons were delivered in Latin, but the bleak conclusion drawn by the Principal Assessor Report for Standard Grade English in 2006. Those marking exams are no longer presented with neat, comprehensible scripts, but with pages and pages of C U l8r, heavily illustrated with emoticons, those smiley or gloomy faces so beloved of teenagers, who probably have no idea that emoticons were originally made up of punctuation marks. In Scotland today, children presenting such scripts go unpenalised.

This is scandalous, but unsurprising. Many young teachers are not conversant with the rules of English themselves. “All those rules stunt creativity” has been the great cry of the past 30 years. We are told that only snobs care about the misuse of “few” and “less”, for example, and that children should be allowed to write and spell as they speak. In both the independent and state sectors, pupils are frequently sent home with handouts littered with spelling and grammatical errors.

It is true that language develops, and it is also true that constantly rapping a child on the knuckles for misusing it would certainly be a bit of a downer. But what the “anything goes” brigade refuse to acknowledge is that there is a difference between developing language and abandoning it.

The Scots have always had an ear for language. Authors and poets, from Walter Scott and Robert Burns to James Kelman and Anne MacLeod, have all used it, and continue to use it, as an instrument. But the talent and appeal of good writers comes through knowing the rules and knowing how most effectively to break them. Letting a child write any old how is tantamount to condemning them to a life of linguistic mediocrity, at best. Language is about communication, and if education is not about helping children to communicate effectively, what is it about?

But we cannot lump all the blame onto teacher training colleges. If exam scripts are full of text message symbols, this is hardly the fault of an examinee, who may well have been uncorrected in any meaningful sense throughout her entire school life. The real culprit is this newfangled “positive marking”, the scheme whereby a child is not marked down for mistakes, but gains marks for things that are right.

If teachers are encouraged to mark so positively that a child skips home believing that what they have written in text message jargon is perfectly acceptable, it is both ridiculous and damaging.

It should not take Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, to point this out. By the executive’s own reckoning, 40% of 13-year-olds in Scotland do not reach the standards in literacy and numeracy set by their own guidelines. This alone should be a spur to a complete overhaul of an exam system that has clearly become a farce. Foreigners now write English better than our own children.

English should be taught properly. Does that seem clear enough?

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