I bring glad tidings, for a change. Half of Britain’s primary schools are to introduce Chinese maths teaching methods.

The section of maths to be taught is that most basic part, elementary arithmetic. Without an ability to operate the four relations of simple numbers – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – you cannot begin to understand the beautiful mysteries of algebra, geometry and trig.

What we are talking about here is not difficult. It is just what my granddad the Leeds newsagent used to call “reckoning up”. This is necessary for the successful negotiation of everyday life.

And yet, on the Department of Education’s own figures, 43 per cent of pupils leave school after eleven years of compulsory, expensive state education unable to “reckon up” efficiently.

This is a scandal, a national disgrace. It is to deprive children of an essential life skill. If there were a similar neglect of sex-education, there would be an outcry.

So how do the Chinese teach basic arithmetic to young children? Pupils from five years upwards are taught as a whole class and they are taught by rote – what we used to refer to more affectionately as “by heart.” And pupils are not permitted to move on to lesson two until they can show they have mastered lesson one. They are required to chant the times tables in unison. Hang on a minute – this isn’t Chinese maths! It’s what we did in Castleton County Primary School, Leeds in the 1950s. The Chinese must have picked it up from us!

And it worked. There were forty-three of us, all scruffy, in our class and only two had difficulty learning arithmetic in this way. That’s a truly outstanding success rating for the old method and it beats hollow the 43% “success” the Education Department claims today. But, despite the fact that the old method proved its worth, it was just one part of our traditional schooling that was destroyed in the 1960s by trendy teachers who had themselves been indoctrinated by lefty politicos in their training colleges and in all those Stalinist Local Education Authorities (LEA’s). They also ruined the teaching of basic English by getting rid of grammar and spelling, with the result that in 2016 you hear every day someone say “We was” and many journalists, of all people, write, “I was sat” and “between you and I.”

I’m delighted to see that there has been this belated return to common sense. The trendy teachers actually despised any teaching of facts and truths. Children were instead encouraged to “explore” and “to learn for themselves how to learn”. It was called child-centred education and it was rubbish. For the truth is that you only really know what’s actually in your head and what you can repeat. Learning basic arithmetic is not to learn a theory. It is to learn how to do something – like learning to ride a bike. Ask anyone who has made any progress in these things and they will tell you it’s all a matter of repetition and practice.

When I was a schoolteacher in the 1970s, I was asked to serve on the BBC Schools Broadcasting Council. I had to go to London four times a year, sit under a portrait of Lord Reith and be bored out of my mind by trendy educational bureaucrats. One day they were lecturing us on “literacy” and “numeracy”. I said: “Sharon’s literacy and numeracy are fine. It’s just that she can’t read or count!”