What would you include in a spelling list!

I think this is getting a bit scary now.

All children must know their 9 times tables parrot fashion by the age of 9! (I may have muddled that up somewhere. There seems too many nines)

What about the anxiety being heaped on the late developers, or the simply less able?

It is the 12 x according to news report I heard today.. Gove has obviously not gone decimal! The crazy thing is most of the recommendations are already, in some form or another, on the curriculum. A case of a politician trying to demonstrate they are doing something!!

Yes - the 12 times.

and "confidently work with numbers up to 10 million"

!!! I can't do that! Howl!!!!!!

I'm not very good with hundreds of thousands. (bites lip with anxiety)

What I would love to hear is someone (without any warning) asking him to do some of the maths. I remember the wonderful moment on the Today programme when they were banging on about what eleven-year-olds couldn't do and someone read out some of the Level 4 maths questions; they were completely shocked by how hard it was.
The twelve times table is a ridiculous waste of time in a decimal age; my nine year old GD has done all of hers up to ten already in school and knows them off by heart, even though she doesn't find maths easy. Spelling lists have been in the curriculum for ages. The uninformed drivel the so-called "educational journalists" write is ridiculous - how can they be so ignorant and why don't they ever question what comes out of the DfE press office?

I'm not sure why you consider the twelve times table to be a waste of time in a decimal age Mamie. Surely we multiply and divide all sorts of things – not just those that work in tens. In fact, when I was at primary school we learned our tables up to the sixteen times table. You never know when these things will be useful. For example, tablespoons measure 15 ml so I find the fifteen times table useful; illustrated books are printed in 16-page signatures, so I find the sixteen times table useful; American cooks still use pounds and ounces, so the sixteen times table is again useful and ditto for American pints (which contain 16 fl oz). No doubt there are people in other fields who do similar sums al the time.

Do you really use the 16x table though absentgrana? I never learnt the 16x table, but I can count in sixteens for a bit and after that I just factorize it to 10 and 6. I can't think I have ever used the 16 times table in cooking though. If you use pounds and ounces, once you get to 16 you move to pounds don't you?

My children learnt their tables on car journeys with me, not at school. I think their English benefitted from the corrections I made to their thank you letters because they all seem to be better than others with apostrophes.

I gave my son a dictionary when he was 7 because I had been into school and seen his spelling book in which the teacher had written 'seceratary' and 'saterday' so I thought it better for him to work it out for himself! A map on another teacher's wall had the 'Artic Ocean' written on it! She was easy to talk to so we told her.

Perhaps they should learn to spell some words they would find useful when dealing with politicians:

barratry
corruption
egotistical
expediency
gerrymander
hypocrite
insincerity
opportunism
self-interest
shabbiness
unprincipled
unscrupulous
venality

absent or the ones they will need for claiming benefits?

absent - and then use them in letters to the Times, of course.

Thank you absent - I'd never heard of the word 'barratry' before!
Now I just need to contrive a situation in which to use it!

Brilliant absent
But barratry not part of my vocab either - need to look it up.
Gerrymandering is a brilliant word isn't it? I wonder how many teachers know the definition let alone the spelling.

A young friend once showed me her homework in which her spelling of chorus, perfectly correct, was marked as wrong by her teacher.
My GD in a fairly formal school in Oz was moved down from the top English group in her class at age 7 for slightly inconsistent use of capitals and slightly wonky writing ... Until DIL had a word with her about the demotivation factor. This is the child that asked me recently, re Jubilee "Is she a very powerful queen?"

My DD spent a lot of time away from school when she was aged 6-8 because she had many health problems. If she managed to do two weeks with out a day off we thought she was doing well. A lot of her school work was sent to her each day, but the thing she learnt at home was her times table. I had a tape called Up to ten with Mr Men. She loved the tape and would play it every day.
On one of the days she was at school the class had a maths test, and the times table was with in the test. She came first in the class !!!
Her teacher asked if she could borrow the tape so that the whole class could hear it.
DD health went on to improve and after leaving school she went on to work in a bank and she how works in a finance. Good old Mr Men

JessM I remember my daughter writing in her school diary that she had been to visit her grandparents and they had taken the dog for a walk along the sward. This was how they always referred to a wide strip of grass next to the beach. Her teacher "corrected" it to sword. I still can't imaginer what she was thinking.