Britain's bad English is India's gain

Poor knowledge of basic English and Maths is said to be putting Britain at risk of losing jobs to India and China.

Workers in Britain have such poor mastery over the three 'Rs' (a widely used abbreviation for reading, writing and arithmetic) that an average of one in three bosses is forced to send company staff for remedial training.

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In a recent report, the most powerful business lobby, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has claimed that failures in the UK school system have left a generation without the basic skills they need to do their jobs, according to Daily Mail.

Poor knowledge of basic English and Mathematics is said to be costing the British economy 10 billion pounds a year and putting Britain at risk of losing jobs to countries like India and China.

One in five employers said they 'frequently' encountered literacy and numeracy problems among recruits and nearly half believed school-leavers nowadays were worse at English than five years ago.

The CBI report also found the problems were not confined to school-leavers. Even university graduates produced written work 'peppered with grammatical and spelling errors'.