Giving kids a large vocabulary won't save them from poverty

The name 'Sir Jim Rose' sounds like a solecism to me - surely if you accept a knighthood your moniker should reflect your nobility? Either style yourself: 'Sir James Rose', or stick to Jim. Still, not only does his very name embody a linguistic error, but Rose - a former head of Ofsted - has the temerity to be launching a campaign aimed at 'helping' those who don't speak like what they oughta.

It's all part of his overhaul of the national curriculum for 7-11 year olds. Rose's proposals place a strong emphasis on teaching children to 'recognise when to use formal language, including standard spoken English'. A Government-backed report has identified what it terms 'word poverty', and suggests that up to 50 per cent of primary pupils in some areas have speech and language difficulties.

The solution is for speaking and listening to be considered as subjects in their own right; Rose's recommendations will build on the £40m 'Every Child a Talker' programme which was launched last year.

Working class argot is not inherently less complex than Standard English

He and his fellow educationalists have noticed a startling fact: that while kids from middle class backgrounds may enter nursery with a functioning vocabulary of 6,000 words, those from impoverished - and, no doubt, immiserated - ones, may have as few as 500 words at their disposal.

My trouble with this is threefold: 1. It's just like all the other educational reforms launched by this government: a sticking plaster to be applied to the gaping wound of an otherwise programmatically unequal society.

2. It makes a profound category error - speech acquisition simply doesn't need to be taught - humans have the ability innately, which is why a child will speak three different languages effortlessly, if she's exposed to them young enough; and 3. It assumes that working class argot is inherently less complex than Standard English - which is not the case.

Some of the most articulate people I know say things like 'It was me what took the Open University course'. Back in the day, many of them would - no doubt - have had these solecisms purged from them with elocution lessons (Margaret Thatcher, née Roberts, was a happy pupil), but in the brave new classless world ushered in since 1979, speaking posh has become detached from being rich - the only true arbiter of social position.

There’s no point in having a large vocabulary if you’re trapped in poverty

Linguists have also established that the grammatical rules of non-standard forms of English (such as that spoken by the crack-dealing Afro-Americans in The Wire), are if anything more complex than those of Standard English, which is presumably why so many of the dumb middle-class whites I know have to watch the show with subtitles. No, let's not confuse class prejudice with language ability. Gervaise may speak with a cut-glass accent, but the only thing he can say is: 'Pass the port'.

Of course, many people from worse off backgrounds aren't articulate in any variant of English, but it wasn't simply teaching Eliza Dolittle to speak proper that effected her transformation - Professor Higgins also put her in the right clothes, fed her the right meals, and gave her meaningful employment. The same goes for these poor mites who only know 500 words - there's no point in having an extensive vocabulary if you remain trapped in poverty.

I wouldn't mind quite so much about Rose's proposals (after all the very phrase 'Rose's proposals' has a certain sonorous alliteration to it), if it weren't for the fact that neither of my two younger mites - both of whom went to state primary school with large vocabularies - ended up able to write properly after four years of fulltime education.

All the buggering about with educational methods, all the dumb 'teaching to the test', and bureaucratic obduracy, means that we now have schools that can't teach basic literacy - even to kids from privileged and cultured backgrounds.

They should stick to trying to do this (something the state managed perfectly well in 1914, when the British Expeditionary Force was the first army to be 100 per cent literate!), and those smart kids from poor backgrounds who have aspirations will end up perfectly articulate. Teaching kids to do something they can do innately is simply the latest symptom of a dumb Government that has lost the ability to run an education system - let alone improve it.