Jayne Dowle: The children with a lot to learn about being successful

Somebody is definitely getting their sums wrong here, and possibly, not reading the small print of the job description properly. How do teenagers who can’t actually add up, or conjure up (and spell correctly) the words for a memo, hope to even keep a job, never mind up the ladder so adeptly that they find themselves earning much more than twice the average salary before they reach 40?

In a way, we have to applaud their touching hope and ambition. Far be it from me to crush anyone’s dreams, but you have to temper great expectations with the acquisition of a few fundamental skills.

Since he announced that his ambition is to run a pub, I am busily encouraging my eight-year-old son to develop his entrepreneurial talents, especially when I look at the cost of sending both him and his sister to university.

But we are currently battling with the issue of long multiplication. When it gets into three figures, he throws his pencil down and rolls his eyes upwards in despair. I told him the other day that he can’t hope to make any profit if he limits himself to numbers less than 100. I think it might have struck a chord.

He’s no model pupil, our Jack. And I suspect that the rest of his years in full-time education will be a challenge. He will be so bored of me and his father ranting on about being able to add up and write legibly that he will probably emigrate to Australia by the time he leaves school.

It is tempting to lay all the blame for this national failing at the door of teachers, but I know from personal experience that sometimes, with the best will in the world, it’s an uphill struggle to get a child to engage. And much as I always argue that we pay teachers to teach, if a child never sees a parent write a letter, or balance a shopping list, or indeed, discuss where the money comes from, how can they have any hope of learning to understand it all themselves?

That said, this is young adults the CBI is talking about here, and employers reporting that too many recruits are struggling with tasks such as composing coherent memos, calculating basic percentages, or working out change. Is it just me who wonders why teenagers, leaving school with record GCSEs each year, don’t seem to be learning anything that could be put to use in the real world?

I know from teaching journalism at university that even the most able students trip up over simple literacy rules such as capital letters and the difference between “their” and “there”. Scary, huh? But even scarier is the contention, from the stroppier ones, that “it doesn’t matter anyway, does it?”

Of course, it matters. And while we don’t expect every budding Lord Sugar to be capable of winning the prize for best-written essay, communication skills are pretty vital for anyone who wants to get ahead in life, never mind in business.

Before we tie ourselves, like Jack, in knots over long multiplication, let’s remind ourselves that teenagers are also failing to grasp team-working, problem-solving, dealing with customers and showing a positive attitude according to the CBI.

And this, I think, is a far bigger problem than knowing whether to sign off an email with “see ya” or “yours faithfully”. It’s that “I don’t care about anybody but me” approach that it is really frightening, and with some lovely individual exceptions of course, it is worryingly endemic.

Of course, some of these youngsters will think that it’s only a matter of months before they win The Apprentice and £60,000 will look like beer money. But as Lord Sugar would tell them, you don’t win unless you compete. And you can’t even begin to compete if you can’t spell, or work out the odds of winning.