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Rose Report

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that intervention and I absolutely concur with it. There are charities and volunteer groups that do a lot of work in the field. Volunteer Reading Help is a national charity with a network of about 1,500 volunteers who have helped more than 4,000 children of primary age. A huge number of people are prepared to work and confer with the professional teacher about how to help children. There is great recognition of the need not only to read but to be able to write, spell and so on. Goodness gracious, I spent from the age of six to the age of 11 learning times tables. I am an absolute expert on nine times seven, although I notice that some Ministers get that question wrong sometimes. We had tables hammered into us and brilliance was demonstrated by a student's ability to do those tests, and by the ability to spell. I think that I am quite a good speller—but gosh, the hours and hours we spent going through spelling books was a waste of time. We should have done something completely different. Politics would have been a good thing to study at a very early age, and I would not have joined the Conservative party either.