I WAS under the impression that “special advisers” to government ministers had to be knowledgeable about the issues on which they were giving “special advice”. Conor Ryan’s (TES, August 30) discussion of the “daily numeracy lesson” (instead of the “daily mathematics lesson”) and his suggestion that the national curriculum expects seven-year-olds to be able to “recite times tables” (rather than recall or derive some multiplication facts) suggest that I was obviously naive to make this assumption.
Ian Thompson Woodlands, Millfield Road Riding Mill, Northumberland
