Students offered language lessons

Record numbers of students will be offered English crash courses

Record numbers of first-year students will be offered crash-courses in basic English and grammar when they start their university courses.

Nearly half of Scotland's universities have been forced to provide remedial fast-track classes because of plunging literacy levels in schools.

They claim undergraduates are not ready for the linguistic and literary demands of degrees after leaving school.

Some students could not write, spell or punctuate simple sentences.

Remedial courses

As a result, Edinburgh's Napier and Heriot-Watt universities and Aberdeen, Dundee, Robert Gordon and Strathclyde universities have all introduced remedial courses this semester.

Many students who are starting their university courses will take the classes alongside their degree studies.

Professor Joe Farrell, a modern languages expert at Glasgow's Strathclyde University, warned that a fundamental lack of basic education was stunting students' ability.

He called for a campaign, spearheaded by teachers, to tackle the dramatic fall in standards.

Young people will not be able to contribute to national life in Scotland without these basic skills Professor Joe Farrell Strathclyde University

He said: "The problem is being concealed by talk of the percentage of Higher passes on the increase when in fact there is no improvement in basic skills.

"It is not a question of raising grades, but if you go behind the results and look at the skills being taught and the level of knowledge and compare that with other European countries, it is something else we have to worry about.

"Scotland has a problem of declining standards.

"Students are coming out of university with fewer skills and this means we will have economic problems in the future as we move into a knowledge economy.

"Young people will not be able to contribute to national life in Scotland without these basic skills."

Missing grammar

A total of 800,000 Scots are estimated to suffer from poor literacy and numeracy skills, with a third of children failing to reach appropriate reading levels by the end of primary school.

Recent research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that 12% of Scots 15-year-olds are judged to be below the most basic level of literacy.

Conservative lifelong learning spokesman, Murdo Fraser, said the situation was appalling.

He said: "This is a shocking indictment of the standards of education in Scottish secondary schools.

Jack McConnell has pledged to tackle Scotland's literacy gap

"They are turning out thousands of pupils who lack the basic skills in literacy and numeracy.

"They've been taught that such skills don't matter - just passing the exam is all that counts.

"This sorry state of affairs is the fault of the Scottish Executive's complete failure of its education policies which just don't work."

First Minister Jack McConnell has pledged to tackle the literacy gap and earlier this year launched a scheme using gap-year volunteer students to teach children how to read.

An executive spokeswoman said it was working to raise standards and preparing to introduce new initiatives to target secondary school pupils.

She said: "To say that standards are falling detracts from the hard work of pupils which has resulted in the pass rate increasing from year to year.

"However, we are not complacent and we are working to improve literary standards across the board, which is why we are going to be introducing new initiatives such as smaller class sizes for S1/S2 in English."