WE hear a lot of complaints about today’s youngsters not getting a proper grounding in the basics at school.

The grumble is that the old-fashioned ‘three Rs’ are no longer taught and memorised, leaving teenagers unable to spell correctly or work out comparatively simple sums without using electronic calculators.

Learning by rote is not the way things are done in most classrooms today, we are told.

Instead, schoolchildren are encouraged to broaden their knowledge base by exploring concepts in a way that some employers claim doesn’t properly prepare them for the world of work. But these criticisms certainly don’t apply to Filip Szary. The 13-year-old pupil at St Bede’s College, Blackburn, has just taken first place in Britain and then Europe in a maths competition entered by 810,000 people from around the world.

He had to answer 114 randomly-generated maths questions in a one-minute online challenge. He said he only became interested in maths after his father told him it ‘is used everywhere in everyday life.’ Let’s hope many more East Lancashire teenagers follow his example – and get such sensible parental encouragement too.