As a country, we gets the basic wrong

as A new pensioner (still as yet not paid my first tranche – lost in the system), I found the Budget interesting (your reports). It was salutary when the Leader of the Opposition asked the opposing front bench which of them would benefit from the reduction of top rate tax – the resounding silence was deafening.

As a Baby Boomer (the result of General Wolff’s surrender in Italy), I have been the recipient of the best of the welfare state during my younger days: good treatment in hospital (three and a half years in the Princess Margaret Rose, Edinburgh); a good education courtesy of Edinburgh’s Corporation schools, Bruntsfield and Boroughmuir.

After dropping a bursary to the Royal High (Boroughmuir was up the road and as good a school as any of those of the Merchant Company), I cannot complain. My only regret was a missed rugby tackle at Burry, which resulted in two slack front teeth, removed in later years.

All of my generation had the possibility to attend university, if one could achieve the requisite results in the fifth year exams. It did not matter if one’s parents had the back-up cash: you were required to make your own way. If the Bank of Mum and Dad could ease the way, fine: if not, tough – pay it yourself.

I left Boroughmuir at the age of 16 with one ambition: to join the Fleet Air Arm as a fighter pilot – to the approbation of all of my teachers, who thought I should go to university. I failed the medical and spent the following 46 years at sea, from deck boy to Master. Not much of a difference, I just never got the chance to crash an aircraft on deck at 100-plus knots.

My point is this: everyone should get an equal education. There will always be some that advance beyond their classmates at different times and stages of their lives for different reasons – ambition, interests, family pressures. It is not possible to legislate for the highest common factor.

What we are doing in schools at present is reducing classroom teaching, and exams, to the lowest common denominator.

I have two grandchildren in primary school. Their bodies are being stretched with treatises on healthy eating, but their brains are not being stretched at all. The point of an education is to exercise a child’s brain to a greater extent than his/her body –the latter is the responsibility of the parents.

This is evident in the number of school-leavers lacking basic skills in literacy and numeracy after having spent 12 years at school. What have they learned?

Children should leave primary school with at least the basic tools of reading, writing and arithmetic – which are the building blocks of communication.

WL Bartlett

Bruce Grove

Pencaitland, East Lothian