An article on the BBC website today states that according to a CBI survery, One in three employers have to give their staff remedial lessons in basic English and maths.   Schools minister Jim Knight said that extra lessons in literacy and numeracy have been in place in primary schools since the late 1990s and that "... GCSEs were being updated to include grammar tests and focus on the basics. "  

You may remember GCSEs from a previous post of mine.

I often find the comments relating to the articles more entertaining or informative than the articles themselves, and here are a couple of nuggets, good or otherwise, on the Have Your Say page entitled Should Managers Give Their Staff Remedial Lessons? 

If these people cannot read and write to a basic standard. How on earth did they fill in their application forms ? and secondly why did employers take them on   [sic]

When I was 3 I was very enthusiastic to learn to read and write so my mum taught me in her spare time. Throughout primary school and secondary school, I never really felt that correct spelling and grammar were high on the teachers list of concerns. I got an A in GCSE English and Maths 4 years ago, but even to this day nobody has taught me what an adverb or noun is! You just have to find out for yourself if you want to.

Speaking as a teacher in a 6th Form College, I think the root of the problem is the focus on student age as the sole benchmark of progression. A student ought to reach certain levels of attainment before moving on to the next stage, hence basic skills would have to be acquired before more advanced work could be done - pushing students into it before they are competent with basic skills means they do not get the chance to master them, and often fail at more advanced work too!

It is unfortunate that employers are picking up the pieces for our educational system's failure, it is not their responsibility whatsoever. I believe it goes further than this though. With the plethora of mindless media celebrity brain-rot content and the "It could be you!" culture, it is no surprise that many school children pay limited attention at school. Instead they dream of being the next overpaid footballer or annoying screeching waste of space of C4's next reality TV show.

Just proves what most of us have known for a long time. A year or two ago I saw a big sign in the window of a local estate agency proclaiming "Property's Wanted"; the agency closed down shortly afterwards, probably because no one wanted to trust a company that boasted the short comings of its staff. If employers only employed the numerate and literate then the government would have to take steps to produce such employable school leavers and "Propery's Wanted" signs would be a thing of the past [sic]