Editorial Comment
January 17th 2005

I confess I was not brilliant at school. Even to this day I can quite easily misspell and muck up my punctuation. But I do clearly remember being able to add and subtract simple sums and was able to repeat 'parrot fashion' my 12 times table by the age of five. By the age of six and a half I was fluent at reading, and could comprehend what I'd read; and by the age of seven I could easily point to all the major capital cities on the globe. Nothing extraordinary in this I suppose, especially by the educational standards we were taught during the early 1950's.

Mind you, we only had one TV station to watch on our black and white Pye television set. We had no video recorders, no DVD players and very few other distractions, apart from the girl next door! I either read a book, listened to the radio or a record on our 78rpm HMV player, or played with my wind-up toys and train set. A dull, but simple and uncomplicated childhood with fond memories of long hot summers, Walls ice cream cones, Punch and Judy shows on the beach, and short cold snowy winters.

What astounded me of recent was the discovery that my 'newly acquired' 13 year-old step-grandson could not spell simple words, could not read properly (very slow), and could not comprehend what he had just read. Although he was just about able to calculate certain sums in his head, I further discovered that he could not name the Prime Minister of the UK, and had no clue where China was located on the map!! What was more astounding, he wasn't the bottom of his class! In fact, according to his marks he was doing rather quite well!!

In light of this revelation I decided to investigate the apparent sorry state of our State school educational system and can reveal the following and disturbing facts.

FACT: 40% of pupils leaving primary schools in the UK are both illiterate and innumerate.

FACT: A quarter of nineteen-year-old's are functionally illiterate; four out of ten unemployed people have no qualifications.

FACT: Six million adults have difficulties with reading and writing.

FACT: One in five adults has less literacy than is expected of an 11-year-old. (If given the alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages, they could not even locate the page reference for plumbers!)

FACT: Poor basic skills cost UK industry more than £4.8 billion a year.

FACT: It costs every company employing more than 50 employees £200,000 (est.) every year in poor quality control, lost orders and poor communication.

FACT: The average company employing 1,000 people or more could save £500 per person if the basic skills of employees were improved.

Recently, a public school with a 100 per cent record in maths and English was been condemned last year by Ofsted because it concentrates too heavily on the three Rs! Madness!

Ofsted also reported that too many teachers do not know enough about the subjects they teach, do not have high enough expectations of the progress their pupils ought to make, and do not have a firm enough grasp on what needs to be done - lesson by lesson, week by week. Geography is now the worst-taught subject in primary schools and fewer teenagers are choosing to study it.

Not content to Rip-Off the adult population, the Govenment is ripping-off our children as well. Good old blighty!

References:

www.literacytrust.org.uk

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/284915.stm

www.justiceinfamilylaw.co.uk/scandal.htm