IT IS to be hoped that the decision by ministers to delay the introduction of compulsory tests in grammar for 14 -year-olds - a goal set by the previous government - is not the harbinger of a total backdown to English teachers who have strongly opposed them.

For it was the evident decline of pupils' English - apparent in clumsy sentences, bad spelling and poor punctuation - and the consequent concern of employers and the public that were the impetus for improvement through the discipline of formal testing.

The teachers, we are told, prefer assessment of these features of the learning of English to be part of a general review of pupils' reading and writing rather than the subject of a separate, specific test. In other words, they want to be the prime assessors.

Yet, what improvement will that offer if they get their way?

For, over at least a generation, the teacher-led downgrading of these disciplines, in the belief that pupils' "creativity" in the use of the language is more important, has led to the situation where it is now possible for even university degrees in English to be obtained without their holders having been taught or assessed in grammar.

Indeed, such is the extent of that decline that a survey for the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority showed that many English teachers themselves were not confident about teaching sentence structure in grammar. How deplorable!

If they cannot teach it, how usefully can they assess it, or claim the prime responsibility to do so?

Surely, the introduction of proper external and independent tests would at least tell us the score.

And, no doubt, it would point not to the need for delay on ways of raising standards of grammar, but to the urgent catching-up job that needs to be done - by both pupils and teachers.

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