We have previously reported that the former Permanent Secretary at the DfES, David Normington, admitted to an Education Select Committee that some staff in his department had problems with literacy. This seems to persist, not just at junior levels, if the rumour about the current White Paper having to be reprinted because of spelling and typographical errors, is true.

Perhaps the solution lies not in the education system that the department nominally controls, but with the new National School for Government where civil servants can spend up to £420 per day (of taxpayers’ money) brushing up their literacy skills. The course most widely applicable may be Reading Faster With Understanding, because it offers liberation for the 4500+ DfES staff who, ‘feel swamped by the amount of paper they have to read or have difficulty understanding, remembering and concentrating on their reading’. The Organisational Benefit promised by this course is, ‘People will read more quickly and more effectively. They will spend less time on reading but produce better results from it, freeing them up to concentrate on meeting priorities’. The only problem is that they are the very same people who produce these mountains of illegible, ungrammatical, undistinguished pap in the first place – the recent White paper being but one small example.

• www.nationalschool.gov.uk