Back to basics

Easy for politicians to demand.  The Telegraph reports:

Up to 600,000 pupils a year will sit a rigorous new writing exam as part of a Coalition drive to ensure children master the basics before starting secondary education.

...

Under the new exams, which will form part of Sats tests, pupils will be expected to recognise the difference between formal and non-standard English, in response to concerns that too many youngsters rely on so-called “text speak” in their written work.

The exam will also focus on the grammatical functions of words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions.
Officials say that children should be “taught to proofread” their work for spelling and punctuation errors, omissions and repetition.
Pupils will also be expected to use “fluent, joined and legible” handwriting and will be taught to use punctuation marks correctly, with a focus on full stops, question marks, commas, inverted commas and apostrophes. 

Not sure how many modern primary school teachers would be competent to teach this.  Grammar and punctuation became a lost art sometime in the 1980s.