IT'S not all the teachers' fault. Not entirely. It's not even Tony Blair's, or even the various education ministers, who are good at grabbing headlines, but not, it seems, much else.

Maybe some of the blame lies closer to home.

Official figures this week showed that nearly half of children are struggling with the three Rs when they leave primary school. Once they get into the huge comprehensives, it gets even harder to make up the difference.

So from the age of 11, they are sunk, drowned, doomed.

True, some of the trendy teaching methods haven't helped. But most teachers I know have long used a pick and mix approach to teaching reading. So what's gone wrong?

The clue came in a comment by the director of education at the University of Buckingham, who suggested that if children as young as three "practised sitting still, talking to each other and grasping pencils in a more formal kindergarten setting, they would be more ready to learn when they reached primary school".

Practice sitting still and talking? Grasping pencils? If children can't do this when they start school, then what on earth have they been doing for their first four years?

Small children need parents who will spend time with them, talk to them, read to them, listen to them. We know there are many children who arrive in the reception classes unable to have a decent conversation.

Most parents and childminders do a good job. Some don't. And it's surprisingly little to do with class or money. Just ask any reception teacher who has to deal with a room full of tinies so wired up that getting them to sit down and listen is a miracle, never mind actually teaching them anything.

Learning begins at home. Plonking a toddler down in front of a TV, is not the same as talking and listening. Playing another video isn't the same as giving them pencil and paper to scribble away, or reading a book together, singing rhymes and songs together.

Quick research among friends of a certain age revealed that most of us could already read by the time we started school. We were no brighter than the current generation of infants. Some of us - me included - had working mothers.

But we weren't constantly bombarded with a gabble of ever-changing sounds and images from all directions and all hours.

We had peace and quiet, time to sit still, time to talk, time to listen and be listened to. By the time we trotted into the reception class with our hankie in our knicker pocket, we were putty in the teachers' hands, our little brains full of welfare state orange juice and cod liver oil and primed for learning.

If you want your children to be taught properly, then you have a responsibility to make them teachable. You could start by switching off the television and talking to them.

ON chauffeur duty at the top of Weardale on Sunday, I met Pat Scott, who is not only a regular reader herself, but sends the column each week to her sister in Exeter. So this is just to say hello to Pat and to Soo Glashier, way down west.

Time to chill out about Cameron

TONY Blair had hair down to his shoulders and played in a band, William Hague drank 12 pints of beer while delivering lemonade, Peter Hain dug up cricket pitches. And I'm not telling you what I got up to as a student.

But that's part of student life. As well as learning how to pass exams, you learn about life, try out other ways of behaving and experiment with all sorts of things that you know you'll probably never do again. It's time out in a sort of protected bubble.

So maybe prospective Tory leader David Cameron smoked a spliff or two. Fine. It's what students - well most of them - do.

He is refusing at the moment to say whether he did or he didn't. Frankly, if that's the worst they can dig up about his past, then he's pretty nearly approaching sainthood.

Whatever he did, he eventually grew up and rejoined the real world.

On this issue, maybe it's time the rest of us did too.

GREAT Mysteries of Our Time. In a fit of autumn cleaning - and in a bid to delay doing any work - I had a mad couple of hours sorting out the study. Heaps of old files, papers and rubbish were thrown out. Ancient notebooks, forgotten press packs, telephone directories going back ten years.

Altogether, the junk filled three big bin bags and a collapsing cardboard box. I was covered in dust and creaking like an old horse from all that stretching and lifting.

Does the study look any cleaner and tidier? No, not a whit. You wouldn't know I'd done anything.

It's the same in the kitchen. You clean out the cupboards, throw away all those jars with half an inch of solidified marmalade, mouldering cranberry sauce or black and unidentified chutney. When you've finished, the bin's overflowing, yet you somehow have less space in the cupboard than you had before.

Forget black holes and expanding universes - it's time Stephen Hawking investigated the physics of the great Kitchen Cupboard Mystery.

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