About half-a-lifetime ago I left teaching. One of my reasons for doing so was being roundly told off by a HM Inspector of schools for teaching a class on poetic metre. He also expressed to me quite clearly that the necessity of teaching grammatical parsing and the art of letter writing were less important than ensuring that "the children were able to express themselves in any form they saw fit without fear of censure".

Please don't blame the teachers. We tried and were shut down by the same politicians who were then pushing child-centred learning and now want to bring back phonics and cursive writing practice because they have re-discovered what we already knew. That it works!