PA
Many UK pupils can’t add, spell
Almost half the parents surveyed said their child is worse at maths than they were at the same age.
More than a quarter of children in the UK aged between 10 and 12 cannot add two small sums of money without using a calculator, a survey has revealed.
Youngsters are leaving primary school unable to spell, add or do times tables and their parents do not have the time to help them, new research shows.
Around a third cannot do division or basic algebra while half do not know what a noun is or cannot identify an adverb. Almost a third cannot use apostrophes correctly.
Despite this, parents only manage to spend less than 10 minutes a day helping their children with their learning, according to online tuition service Mytutor, which commissioned the survey.
More than a quarter of children surveyed could not add £2.36 and £1.49 to get £3.85; more than one in five could not use the correct version of ‘they’re’, ‘there’ or ‘their’ in a sentence; almost a third could not pick the correct use of an apostrophe from three simple sentences, and more than four in 10 couldn’t spell the word ‘secretaries’ correctly. Over a third could not divide 415 by five and a quarter did not know the answer to seven multiplied by six.
Almost half the 1,000 parents surveyed said they think their child is worse at maths than they were at the same age, and more than a third felt their child’s English was worse than theirs was at the same age.
Almost four in 10 parents said they spend less time learning with their children than their parents did a generation ago – with only 30 per cent spending more time than their parents did.
Nearly six out of 10 parents spend less than an hour a week learning with their children, breaking down to around eight-and-a-half minutes a day. One in five parents spend less than 30 minutes a week learning with their offspring.
Nick Smith, head of online tuition at Mytutor, said: “Maths and English are key skills for children as they enter secondary school, yet our study shows many are already slipping behind their peers and could be lacking confidence.
“Addressing these shortcomings early can make an enormous difference to a child’s school career.”
The survey of 1,000 children aged between 10 and 12 found that one in four did not know their times tables, a quarter could not use decimal points, and two in five cannot spell simple plurals. Mr Smith added: “Hectic modern lifestyles are leaving parents with less and less time to spend with their children – whether that is helping them with homework or other educational activities.
Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg said: “Clearly, as this reports demonstrates, there is still much to be done to ensure children leave primary school with a grip of the basics.
A Department for Education spokesman said: “Getting the basics right at primary school is vital.
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Pule' Carmel
Feb 5th, 13:17
The other day, I assisted some young people in their middle twenties who has seen the light in that knowledge is useful after all and so they were trying to follow a scientific based course.
they showed me some past examination papers and I thought I would show them through the workiings by starting at the level of logic required by the " Problem".
I asked one to read the question and noticed that reading was lacking and after I explained the contents,
I realised that she did not know the operation of some required arithmetic, the ideas of indices and numbers to the power of positive and negative numbers was unknown. They all had good programmable calculators but in multipluing 5*( 3 + 4*P) some were forgetting the priorities and progeammed 5*3+4*P.
There was no hope of these young people to get to the level of solving the questions asked.
Another interesting situation was when the result of one oeration had to be used in another operation, Somehow they could not see this as they thought that each operation had enough information to give results indipendently of other operations.
Also finding the subject of the formula is done through, " when you take this over to the other side you have to add a negative sign and crossmultiplying numerators and denominators in some cases to get rid of the denominators!! All this induced in the memory system of young peole without the reason why such operation takes place. I feel that the fundamentals are not being projected with reason and logic but with " You nost remember the sybbol and not the true reason for a particular operation.
I am sorry to say that many people have not yet come up to the stage of feeling the true spitit and beauty of mathematics and physics and science and still can handle only the older professions with memory requirements rather than processing activities.
Please stop experimenting with our children, there are proven set methods how to teach the logic of mathematics and aritmethic and let us use them. It has been shown in many countries that the TOP DOWN teaching system does not work and it seems that building on good old fasioned lower foundation is the thing to do and not impress the chiuldren with the colourful pictures on the screen of a computor, The logic I am talking about has to be felt in spirit and can only be progected by good parents and teachers who are qualified in the subject and went though what they teach in practical terms.
So much damage has been done by parents and teachers alike who are not qualified to teach the subject but they think they can.