‘Campaign will help future of business’

Nigel Wild, president of the Oxfordshire Chamber of Commerce, believes education in the UK has been a “political football” for so long that youngsters are no longer being taught the basics properly.

Mr Wild, 64, from Ascott-under-Wychwood, said: “I have come across young people who could not add up unless they had a calculator and could not write a sentence to save their lives.

“I remember thinking that I could do better than them at the age of 10.

“Employers despair at standards of literacy and numeracy and some of the bigger companies run year-long courses to bring them up to speed, which is a sad indictment of the system.”

Grammar is also an area which Mr Wild reckons has been neglected.

“At school I used to do a precis several times a week and wondered what it was for. But now I find myself doing it all the time, for example if I am helping cut a business plan into shape.

“The problem is that education has been the biggest political football since the 1960s. I don’t think there was too much wrong with the way I was taught in school. We need a back-to-basics approach.”

Mr Wild is backing the Oxfordshire Reading Campaign as being a key initiative to raise standards among young people.

He said: “Books have been important all my life.

“My mother taught me to read before I went to school and I used to read three or four books a week. I have been doing it ever since.”

Now he has fulfilled an ambition by having his own book published.

Nightwalk is a novel about a hero of the Resistance during the Second World War.

Mr Wild added: “I used to listen to the radio a lot as a child, especially a programme called Spycatcher. “Then I went on holiday to France and one day it was raining. By the time it had stopped I had written two chapters and I just carried on after that.”

After several rejections, the book was published by Austin & Macauley in January. Mr Wild is now working on his second novel.