How can our children be taught properly when teachers themselves lack skills?

Gill Turner (Letters, 21 August) would have us believe that the standard of education in Scotland now is better than that which was destroyed over 30 years ago.

How is it, then, that an increasing number of schoolleavers lack adequate numeracy and literacy skills? We are told that teachers are graduating from teacher training colleges without the skills necessary to teach maths to Primary 7 level. Surely they do not go to teacher training college to learn the basic skills of numeracy but to learn teaching skills to enable them to pass on the knowledge they gained at school to the children in their classrooms.

If they don’t have the basic knowledge one has to query how they were admitted to teacher training college in the first place. What were the entry qualifications? I started school in 1944.We learned the alphabet and times tables by rote. By Primary 7 we were learning algebra and geometry. We were writing essays and were required to read a designated book each term known as a “home reader”.

All this was based on the grounding that led to Scotland in those days being able to boast having the best education system in the world. That grounding was the Three Rs, which is the foundation of a child’s future education. Without that foundation there is nothing to build on and the child will struggle throughout school and, sadly, life.

Politicians talk of investing billions of pounds in schools and education. Throwing money at a house to provide terrific decor and furniture won’t help a bit if the foundations are weak. Intervention must be immediate at Primary 1 to stop the rot, but who is going to teach them? Since the 1970s the basic groundings have been inadequate. The results are there to be seen. We have had 40-odd years of people leaving school to become teachers who themselves lack the basic foundations in the Three Rs. It has become a downward spiral and is getting worse.

It is probable that teachers will have to be recruited from the Continent, where standards are higher and where, having been taught English as a foreign language, they will have been taught the grammar and syntax of English to a standard which is not taught in our schools today. How is someone expected to learn a foreign language if they don’t understand the structure of their own language?

Someone will no doubt point to the record numbers going to university, but if you dumb down the exams and lower pass marks you can achieve the statistics you want to show. We must get back to basics and establish a sound foundation for future generations of Scots.

Many of my generation have watched the decline in the standard of education with horror, but are not surprised that the politicians have not understood the failings because they themselves are a product of a failed system.

Gill Turner scoffs at the PISA ratings, but I guarantee that if they showed Scotland off in a good light internationally she and the SNP would be acclaiming them as a true measure of an education system.

DONALD LEWIS Gifford, East Lothian