23 Jan 2012 More than a quarter of children 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 (27%) of children surveyed could not add £2.36 and £1.49
to get £3.85; more than one in five (22%) could not use the
correct version of “they’re”, “there” or “their” in a sentence
and almost a third (31%) could not pick the correct use of an
apostrophe from three simple sentences. In addition, more than a
third (36%) could not divide 415 by