“A lot of them write how they speak”: policy, pedagogy and the policing of ‘nonstandard’ English

International studies of talk-intensive (or ‘dialogic’) pedagogies have demonstrated that children who experience academically challenging classroom discussion (‘dialogue’) make greater progress than their peers not had this experience. In England, gains in achievement been greatest for pupils from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds, thus underlining the importance dialogue to social mobility. However, policy prescriptions on ‘standard English’ run counter principles dialogic teaching by privileging ‘correct’ forms expression over emerging ideas. article, we argue schools can be coerced macro-level into creating meso-level policies which police nonstandardised with assumption will improve literacy rates. We draw upon a corpus Ofsted reports as well data collected primary – pupil writing and focus groups, video-recorded lessons teacher interviews demonstrate features spoken dialect grammar occur infrequently writing, yet narrative is ‘problem’ within education driving policy/practice detrimental talk learning. must addressed urgently if are exploit full potential learning addressing educational inequities.