Due to budget cuts the three R’s have been reduced to the two R’s Michael Gove announced yesterday. From the start for the next academic year teachers will no longer be required to teach pupils how to read, oddly the only one of the three R’s actually beginning with R.

With a third cut from the education budget schools are under strain, and along with the rebuilding programme, reading has been scrapped. ‘Pupils will leave school illiterate which is little different to the current situation and at least we wont spend billions trying to succeed where we obviously fail’.

During this mornings Today Programme interview John Humphries challenged Michael Gove on the paradox that children wont understand what they are writing, the Education Minister responded by holding up his mobile phone displaying the message ‘LOL’.

Other plans include ‘Modern Apprenticeships’ where, from children the age of 5, will be taught a skill such as stitching footballs together and the ‘Open Schools’ Policy.

“Pupils will be taught in ‘Open Schools’; an environment free from the shackles of the traditional classroom with fields, car parks and tops of tower blocks facilitating real blue sky thinking. The resulting savings will allow every pupil to be issued with an umbrella to protect them from the extremes of weather”.

Savage cuts have hit other departments hard, in some case forcing them to merge. As Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has gained an expanded brief, in charge of the newly formed ‘Treasury, Work and Training’ or TWAT. Ed Milibands only comment on this matter was ‘C’est le vie, if the hat fits let the man wear it”.