Why is there a sudden change in our education system which means our 4-5 year old sons and daughters are having to learn two completely (and in their uninformed minds) separate alphabets?

One alphabet is the one they learn to read with and have used to form their initial writing of letters for hundreds of years and the other is the highly complicated, curly alphabet used in cursive handwriting.

In their young minds, the two are completely unrelated and as far as my youngest grandson is concerned, there appears to be no improvement in his understanding of where to begin forming a letter in the cursive style, than there was a year ago. Even though throughout the last year at his nursery school he had been improving very well in writing his traditional letters with us at home.. In his Year 1 at school now, to me a whole year of his writing education has been wasted and lost.

His elder brother who is four years older and learned to write in the traditional way, learned to form his cursive handwriting in I would say around one month.

During the sixties, before my sons were born, we had friends whose children were taught to read and spell using a phonics system and sad to say, that generation of children grew up to be the most horrendous spellers you can imagine.

Please explain yourselves Ministers - this is our children's education you are experimenting with.

is this system optional? Our children are losing out on at least a year's worth of understanding something they had been progressing well with for hundreds of years.