Speech
– 230 candidates;
- 156 passed – 68 per cent

Since the Government gave the go-ahead in 2002 for the closure of about 3,000 urban post offices across Britain hardly a town or city in the country has been untouched by the rationalisation. By the same token, there cannot be many local newspapers that have not reported on proposed closures in their circulation areas and the protests that have resulted.

This was the scenario presented to candidates and should have been familiar to the vast majority of them. The results suggest otherwise. Many seemed oblivious to the closure programme (even though it was included in their briefing notes) and other struggled to grasp the significance of closures on local communities and the people who use the post offices.

There was a wide variation in the quality of the stories produced. Some were exceptionally good in terms of content and writing. These candidates are a real credit to their newspapers and the training they have received. But at the other end of the scale the markers were presented with stories that were incomplete, inaccurate and poorly structured.

Many stories started off well and most candidates included protests at the planned closure of five post offices in Oxdown in their intros. But from then on it was all too often a rapid decline into mediocrity. On numerous occasions the five threatened offices were not identified and essential details of the protest rally, i.e. time and place, were omitted.

There was also confusion between Oxdown and Oxshire. Although 10 closures were proposed across the county the basis of the protest was the Oxdown Five. The protest group was the Oxdown branch of the Oxshire Pensioners' Association, but far too many candidates got this wrong.

There was a superficial approach to numerous stories and the reason for the post offices' closures was not explained fully, although it would have helped the reader to place local events in a wider national context. Candidates who did well demonstrated an ability to understand the broader picture.

The speech included a good selection of key quotes and, again, the best candidates included some of these to give their stories additional impact. However, others struggled to include the quotes, often relying on snippets, which in a number of stories, were used out of context and inaccurately.

Indeed, inaccuracy was a recurring problem and suggests that shorthand notes were not all they might have been. In some cases the errors were slightly amusing, but in others they either changed the sense of the story or simply did not make sense.

"Mini suburbs" became "many suburbs" or even "mini suburbia", "endangered species" appeared as "integrated species", while "faceless mandarins" were variously described as "feckless", "facility" or "flaccid", and "totted up" ended up as "dotted" and "calculate" as "substitute".

The markers were surprised to learn that "90 per cent of people now use a bank to collect pensioners"!

A few candidates failed to make accurate use of free information provided in their brief. Albert Tetlow appeared as Tatlow, Tedlow, Tallow or just plain Albert. Similarly, St Mary's Way also became Place or Road.

These errors, and other examples of incorrect copying from the brief, were penalised accordingly by the markers.

Click for more on the: