Sats girl takes Michael Gove, the comma chameleon, to task Michael Gove, secretary of state for education, has been told by a year 6 candidate to practise what he preaches. Michael Gove's complaints about poor writing standards in English classrooms have been put in perspective after a 10-year-old upbraided him for grammatical inconsistencies in this week's spelling, punctuation and grammar tests. Rebecca Lee, a year 6 pupil at Christ Church primary school, an academy in Clifton, Bristol, wrote to the education secretary after she and her classmates noticed inconsistent use of commas to delineate sub-clauses in sentences while sitting the Sats this week. "I understand that you are very keen for us all to learn our complex sentences and use of accurate punctuation," Rebecca wrote. I believe that your department should also use the correct punctuation in all the Sats tasks. Fortunately for Gove, the 10-year-old stopped short of calling for his immediate resignation, but added: "I would like to hear what you have to say about this and also whether you will perhaps admit that punctuation is often a matter of judgment, with not necessarily a single right answer." Just last week, Gove gave a speech in which he highlighted the poor letter-writing skills of boys and girls in England, compared with their counterparts overseas, claiming this "regretfully acknowledged a terrible truth about English students." Jo Lee, Rebecca's mother, said her daughter came out of the test exercised about the questions. She said, 'Who's in charge of these things?' Told that the secretary of state had ultimate responsibility, and following some research on the internet, Rebecca composed her response. "She dictated it and I typed it and we sent it off there and then," Lee said. Barney Braithwaite, Rebecca's teacher at the Church of England primary academy in Clifton, said pupils noticed the apparent mistakes during the test and raised it with him. "The whole question with grammar is that it is flexible," he said. But when you have to teach it for a test then you have to teach it as a rule. For the test, sat across England on Tuesday, pupils had to insert a correctly spelled word missing from a sentence. Question 6 read: "If there is not [blank] rainfall this month there will be a drought." Question 16 read: "As he was the [blank] of the tribe the final decision was his." The pupils protested that a comma was required after "month" in Q6 and "tribe" in Q16. The result is mild embarrassment for the education department in the first year that the "Spag" (spelling, punctuation and grammar) tests for year 6 pupils have been conducted. The wording of the tests was approved by the Standards and Testing Agency, an executive agency of the Department for Education. A department spokesperson said: "The commas here are a matter of choice: they can be used to mark out clauses that appear at the beginning or the end of a sentence, but they are not necessary. We decided to use commas sometimes and not at others to make the tests more like real life where people will have their own styles. David Marsh, editor of the Guardian style guide, writes: You don't need to insert a comma between clauses, but doing so can make the sentence easier to read (as with this one). Both examples are perfectly grammatical with or without the comma but I would be inclined to use a comma after "tribe" in the second one. Reading such sentences out loud is a good guide. I pause slightly after "tribe," which suggests that a comma should be inserted. It adds a slight emphasis to the clause that follows. But insisting on a comma is, if I may be permitted to use a word that is not to be found in any dictionary, bonkeroony.