Literacy Shock

There is a report by the OECD that the level of literacy and numeracy skills among young people in Britain is almost the lowest of all the developed countries and way behind the likes of Holland, Finland and South Korea. And we are not talking about reading Tolstoy; evidently some are floored by the instructions on an aspirin bottle. This is terrible news, although perhaps we suspected that all was not well. Reports from employers that Poles speak and write better English was a warning.

I have some family connections to teaching and was once an additional governor parachuted into a school in Special Measures, so I have some pretty clear cut observations. The problem almost always stems from primary schools, because chronically weak teaching in too many of these just does not give the firm grounding on which to build, causing knock on effects when moving on to secondary school, college or university. This could be due to poorly qualified teachers but I believe it is more to do with the desire to meddle with teaching practice. There are certain basics like night and day which are not up for silly nostrums of the hour. Those include the idea that children should learn about problems with numbers before they have learned the numbers themselves (their tables) or that they should be encouraged to express themselves in writing before they have learned how to spell.

These daft ideas do not work. Learn that.

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