Teaching basics at an early age frees children

Viv Apple
West Bridgford, Nottingham

Sir, Sean O’Neill evidently supports those middle-class parents whose privileged children will educationally survive almost any form of progressive teaching. Not so the mass of disadvantaged children who if they are not taught to read, write and count at primary school are often not taught at all. For them, failure to acquire these skills at the earliest age represents a lifelong handicap.

Statistics demonstrate that for such children, subsequent post-primary schooling rarely offers improvement. Anecdotal evidence often masks the real issue and the Thunderer’s parental dialogue is not likely to be repeated in the streets of inner-city public housing.

Robert L McCartney, QC
Chairman, National Grammar Schools Association

Sir, I am a retired primary teacher working with children in local schools on a voluntary basis. I have a doctorate in education, specifically on how we learn.

According to The Times (Report, Apr 30), thousands of parents will shun tests for their six and seven-year olds this week with tacit or open support from head teachers.

Hurrah! At last! Direct action against illogical, counterproductive testing supposedly aimed at raising standards and tests that ignore widely differing developmental stages of pupils in early childhood (recognised as between nought and eight years by developmental psychologists). These are stages when play activity and social interaction is vital in helping children to progress to formal learning. Yet these experiences are threatened by test preparation. Teachers don’t have to test to assess; they do it naturally and continually.

If only they were freed from ever- changing governmental directives, teachers could use their expertise to raise standards. Meanwhile, direct action needs to be maintained.

Norma Mudd
Burscough, Lancashire

Sir, Thank you Mr O’Neill. Four implicit questions raised in this article cry out to be answered. What useful knowledge is being taught and tested? Is it age appropriate? What is its relevance to literacy? Why, if it is so crucially important, are free schools and academy schools exempt? It is the very last thing I want for my wonderful three-year-old grandson to have to learn.

James M Barrett, BA, M ED, CERT ED, DIP ED
Warkworth, Northumberland

Sir, Funnily enough, yesterday my six-year-old granddaughter was only telling her silly grandpa what these grammatical phenomena are. Quite how I have managed most of my life without this knowledge is a complete mystery.

Paul Cunliffe
Bolton

Tips on tipping

Sir, The government proposals (“Time’s up for service charges at restaurants”, May 2) on gratuities is to be welcomed. On discovering that servers in restaurants were charged a “handling fee” or “commission” by their employers on tips added to credit or debit card payments, my wife and I began paying by card minus any added fee and then giving the commensurate sum, in cash, to the employee. This also removes the “guilt factor” that otherwise affects you when you strike out the extra charge applied. It also means that you can get the gratuity payment right on those card machines that require you to add it yourself and where you risk adding only a derisory 5p or, worse still, £50, where the intended tip is £5.

Richard Byham
Braintree, Essex

Sir, As I understand it, one of the principle reason for “discretionary” service charges is that VAT is not levied on this portion of the bill. Correctly none of the customers, management, or staff wish to pay an unnecessary 20 per cent tax. If management creams off all, or part, of the services charges without paying the VAT, this is tax evasion.

Many restaurants make it clear that the service charge is voluntary. Whether management then ensure that all such charges, when paid by credit or debit card, reach the staff is another matter. Currently the only way for the customer to ensure that a tip gets to the staff is to give it in cash.

Stewart Reuben
Twickenham, Middlesex

Sir, At last the government has decided to look at the thorny subject of tipping. On my first visit to Australia I remember a waiter angrily returning my tip to me and saying that he was paid for his work and was not a beggar. I also remember joining a colleague for breakfast at his upmarket hotel in New York. Service was awful and we left only to be pursued down the street by our waiter waving the bill calling out, “Sir, you have forgotten my tip.”

David Housden
Elton, Cambs

Sir, My pan-fried sea bream costs about £17 in most restaurants. I can buy it at the fishmonger for £3. I always presumed that the balance covered the act of cooking it, the surroundings, and serving it at the table. I can’t understand why, for that last part, I have to help the restaurateur with his wage bill. When I worked I neither expected, was never offered, nor even received a tip. Dissatisfied customers?

His Honour Barrington Black
London NW3

Halal abattoirs

Sir, Your report (May 2) about the closure (pending investigation) of a “halal” abattoir points to an apparent breach not only of national but of EU legislation. The real problem is not the behaviour of one abattoir in one country but that EU legislation on the stunning of animals before slaughter continues to permit the “religious” exemption from the “stunning before slaughter” requirements.

Not all EU member states avail themselves of that exemption. Denmark, Norway and Sweden have already banned all forms of slaughter without pre-stunning. Outside the EU, Switzerland has done the same.

Over the past decades, the UK has played a constructive role in improving farm animal welfare at EU level but we have been slow in tackling the issue of religious slaughter. Voting to Remain provides us with the opportunity to join others in seeking to eliminate practices that have no place in a modern society. At the very least, it is time to press for EU rules to ensure that “halal” or “kosher” products are labelled, so that consumers can be made aware of what it is that they are buying.

Stanley Johnson
Founder-chairman, European parliament’s intergroup on animal welfare

Sir, The article about the halal slaughterhouse raises the point of whether such establishments are necessary. We no longer hang people, nor chop off their heads, yet we permit the killings of animals by slitting their throats while still alive. The origin of the procedure was to provide fresh blood for the deity’s altar and to ensure that meat was freshly killed before eating. On neither counts is it now necessary. If followers of Judaism and Islam cannot accept this, they should import kosher and halal meat from countries where such methods of slaughter are acceptable.

David Olliver
Altrincham, Cheshire

Working for the EU

Sir, Richard Davy (letters, May 2) asks the wrong question in regards to the UK nationals working for the EU. With 3.6 per cent representing the UK out of 28 countries, that is almost the exact proportion that each country should have representing them — 28 x 3.6 = 100.8. The question is, who is hogging a disproportionate number of posts?

Peter Hime
Salisbury

State of the Unions

Sir, It is true, as Sir Richard Ottaway says (letters, May 2), that following independence in 1776, the US Union grew as further states were granted entry. The constitution set out the rights accrued to the Union and those remaining with the sovereign states, called states’ rights. When the Union voted (by what the EU might call qualified majority) to abolish slavery, some southern states deemed their states’ rights infringed and seceded from the Union. Historians will argue over whether this view was justified.

The SNP has threatened to secede if the overall vote goes to the Brexit camp while Scotland votes Remain. How might the English feel if the vote is to Remain by majority in three countries of the Union but not in England?

Peter Cobb
Wigginton, Herts

Antisemitism row

Sir, Instead of whitewashing decades of antisemitic rhetoric by some prominent Labour politicians, Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob (letters, May 2) should address the antisemitism prevalent in the British Muslim community. It was the Muslim, Labour-supporting, former political editor of the New Statesman, Mehdi Hasan, who exposed its “routine and commonplace antisemitism”. In a 2013 article he wrote: “The sorry truth is that the virus of antisemitism has infected the British Muslim community. It’s our dirty little secret. I can’t keep count of the number of Muslims I have come across for whom antisemitic conspiracy theories are the default position for a range of national and international events.”

Or do Hasan’s accusations amount to “racism and intellectual terrorism”?

Roslyn Pine
London N3

Historical horrors

Sir, Kaya Burgess is right to report (Apr 30) that the BBC drama, The Monocled Mutineer, was disowned for gross inaccuracy by its own historical adviser when broadcast in 1986. Yet he omits the main reason for its having been “incredibly controversial at the time” — a scene depicting the rape, by British soldiers, of nurses near the frontline for which there was no historical basis. Confronted with this embarrassing fact, the BBC’s managing director of television, Bill Cotton, made matters worse by declaring that the drama told “the greater truth” about the First World War, thus revealing the agenda of those behind its production. In reality, such were the horrors of trench warfare on the western front, it is testimony to the courage and resilience of those who served that instances of insubordination were so few and far between.

Julian Lewis, MP
House of Commons

New bank holiday?

Sir, Once again, the May Day holiday has proved to be (at best) cold and (at worst) cold, wet and windy. The bank holiday at the end of May has been absorbed into half-term. There are then no bank holidays until the end of August. May I suggest that a new bank holiday near the Queen’s official birthday at the end of June would be a fitting souvenir in perpetuity of this year’s celebrations?

By that date, the weather might have improved.

Helen Griffiths
North Curry, Somerset