Terrible times, indeed … 
Muddy, You can take a horse to water but you can’t make them drink!
You never met my old headmistress.
No child left her ( primary ) school unable to read or write .
A similar situation to my mother. “Sickly” children couldn’t “catch up” with education so they were taught “earning” skills … 
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If they couldn’t read or write and were disabled how could they learn ‘earning skills .’
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Indeed:
In a wide-ranging interview with the Times, Labour’s deputy leader opened up about caring for her mother, who has bipolar disorder, from the age of 10, getting pregnant at 15 and leaving school with no qualifications at 16.
The Ashton-under-Lyne MP also revealed how she never received love and affection as a child and was once given dog food to eat because her mum couldn’t read the label on the tin.
She was also given ‘jelly and shaving foam’ because her mother ‘used to look on the pictures’ on products.
Monkey see, monkey do.
If she wants to be a leader she should stop banging on about it it’s getting boring .
Entire boatloads of Vietnamese came out of horrible camps and still did well at schools in countries and languages they didn’t speak
Yes, but don’t underestimate the power of peer pressure. When I started school it was in an awful area and being “clever” was no way to gain friends. Living where we did was on the border between real slum and not quite slum and my mum used to give some tuition and somehow I didn’t fall into the “be bad to be good” demograph but I saw it at work time and time again. I avoided it.
It doesn’t sound as if Angela Rayner’s mother even got close to the water very often!
From a family of 12 children, she just dropped out of school and didn’t go. I don’t know why the authorities and her parents didn’t make her
The sixties were still fairly brutal times if you were poor, think Cathy Come Home and I suppose some slipped through the net
Her bipolar and depression must have been fairly severe because she was sectioned?
I did go to school Omah / AT
Peer pressure worked the other way too.
I was in a class of clever kids and expected to do well .
But reading and writing were not an issue with anyone everyone entered secondary education knowing how to read and write ,
That film was used to drum into our 4 girls the perils of dangerous liaisons.
My school was so strict any absence had to be followed by a parental note .
We had to be practically dead before my parents allowed us a day off.
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Well I like Angela Rayner and just wish she would replace Starmer.
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Me too, and their were truancy officers too. But somehow Angela Rayners mother must have slipped through the net
What are her policies that makes you say that .
I was very clever as an 11-year-old - I was one of only 20, from the thousands who took the 11-Plus the same year, to be awarded a scholarship to the local grammar (public) school … 
However, some children struggled in “lower” streams and, some years earlier, would have been sent to the “Secondary Modern School” to learn a “craft”. Luckily, some “Comprehensive Schools” had been introduced, which gave “late bloomers” a second chance.
She (AR ) would look good in this outfit and put that hair behind her too .
Although those old reprobates in the HOC would probaby have heart attacks .
Oh, the Southerners say the same about us Yorkies, though in fairness they speak more understandably.
Ah, so she came from the North and the South?
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