Carnegie medal winner Sally Gardner attacks Gove's 'outdated' new curriculum.
Sally Gardner wins the most prestigious children's books prize with dystopic novel Maggot Moon and uses the prize-giving ceremony to slam Gove's 'outdated' new curriculum. Carnegie medal winner Sally Gardner: 'Politicians need to get out of schools and let teachers do what they do best - teach...we need to nurture imagination, not crush it with standardised tests, which don't mean a thing in the real world'.
Dyslexic author Sally Gardner, who today won the Carnegie medal for her dystopian story of a boy standing up to a totalitarian state, has slammed Michael Gove's new curriculum for "exclud[ing] rather than embrac[ing]" those like her, "with a different way of seeing and thinking".
Gardner, branded "unteachable" as a child and expelled by one of the numerous schools she attended, was 12 when she was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. The hero of her Carnegie-winning teen novel Maggot Moon, Standish Treadwell, is also dyslexic and is written off by teachers and bullied by his peers, who chant "Standish Treadwell / Can't read, can't write / Standish Treadwell / Isn't bright". But when his best friend Hector is arrested, Standish decides to take action against the oppressive power of the "monstrous Motherland" - an alternate version of 1950s England - where he lives.