Listen to the following, from the Today programme this morning, about how schools fail to deliver adequate literacy to students. The early part is an interview with Vernon Brown, who left school aged 16 with what they described as "a literacy level below that of an 11 year old".
From about 1 minute 20 seconds in, you will hear the interviewer say to him:
"You sort of slipped through the net, then. You left school with 7 GCSEs. It wasn't enough to get into college, but now you're doing this literacy course..."
Sorry?!? Let's go back and listen to that again...
"You sort of slipped through the net, then. You left school with 7 GCSEs."
What?? One more time...
"You left school with 7 GCSEs."
So, despite being functionally illiterate, such that he is doing a remedial literacy course and talking to journalists about how bad his reading used to be, this guy got seven GCSEs!! This flashed past without comment in the interview, but mightn't that be the problem right there? What were these GCSEs in? What did he have to do to achieve passes in them? How can our education system have disintegrated to the extent that someone can get seven - seven, not one or two, by some fluke of multiple choice marking or over-generous interpretation of incoherent scrawl; seven - GCSEs, despite not being able to read or write properly?
UPDATE: The other thing about this was that this guy claimed that his literacy problems arose because the teachers spent all their time dealing with the ablest and least able students in the class, and people in the middle like him were ignored. But the interview was predicated on the idea that he was illiterate. So if he was in the middle, what were the teachers doing with the least able in the class? Teaching them to speak??
Perhaps a number of commenters below are correct and this chap actually isn't all that illiterate at all. In which case he must be a bit put out at the way he was presented in the radio clip!
