Education Letters: Going Dutch

I live in a place where all the children cycle to school ("Back in the Saddle", EDUCATION&CAREERS, 26 June). My younger daughter's primary school doesn't have car parking. My elder daughter's secondary school has more parking spaces for bikes than it has students.

Of course, I'm not in England any more. This is Assen in the Netherlands. The secondary school says 100 per cent of the children cycle most days, but that it drops as low as 95 per cent in the winter. The school has a huge catchment area and children cycle anything up to 20km each way to get to school and back, and in winter the temperature was below freezing for the best part of a month. I'm not really surprised that some of them stopped cycling for a few days.

Primary schools are also swamped by bikes. So, what's the difference? Well, the government here really takes cycling seriously. While Ruth Kelly has promised £140m over three years for cycling (that works out as about 70p per person a year in the UK, the city I live in now spends €25 (about £20) per person a year on new infrastructure alone. Maintenance, cycle training and so on come from separate budgets, which add up to about the same again. They've been doing this for decades and the landscape for cyclists is transformed as a result.

The British approach seems to be to claim that training will somehow overcome people's natural reluctance to cycle in conditions that are neither safe nor pleasant. The Dutch don't do it like that. They make the conditions wonderful so that cycling is irresistible and everyone wants to do it. It's quicker to cycle from our house to the centre of the city than to drive. If we cycle we take the most direct route, there are no traffic lights, we spend most of the time on a "bicycle road" where cars have to give way to bikes. If we drive, we take a detour, have to give way to cycle crossings, have traffic lights and must pay for parking, which is further from the shops than the free bike parking is. They keep cyclists in pleasant conditions so that cycling is always an attractive option.

It's not a cheap way to do it, but it has worked. The 16 million population of this country make about the same number of cycle journeys as the entire English speaking world. The people who live in this city make an average of 1.1 cycle journeys a day. That's all age groups.

This morning I watched the neighbour opposite set off on her bike with a 9-month-old child on a seat and our 87-year-old neighbours two doors down set off on theirs. This is not an exceptional morning.

David Hembrow, Assen, The Netherlands

GOOD GOVERNANCE

I have sympathy with Terence Kealey's point that the Higher Education Funding Council for England should keep out of governance arrangements at Oxbridge, as should business interests that are often posed as the internal alternative ("The state should keep its hands off Oxbridge", EDUCATION&CAREERS, 26 June). However, I doubt that the status quo is an option. Forty years on from 1968 couldn't staff and students run the colleges?

Keith Flett, Tottenham, London

SHAPING YOUNG MINDS

Sir Peter Williams' review of maths in primary schools is interesting and can no doubt be creative so long as the teachers trained to be experts in the subject are also inspirational (Leader, EDUCATION&CAREERS, 19 June). Expertise where children are concerned is just not enough. However, pre-school children are naturally numerate and if we try and teach in a direct way too early, we are in danger of eroding fragile, but growing, self-esteem. One would think carers had never had an original thought, nor any innate wisdom or instincts about children. How we have survived all these thousands of years Heaven only knows.

The early teaching of mathematics will do more to create the familiar culture of "I am no good at maths", than leaving it to the real experts; those who love and nurture the young.

Basic numeracy comes easily to children and, when ready, with very little help they move naturally from the concrete to the abstract. Not wanting to trivialise things, but has Ed Balls never heard of "fingers" and "toes", or "1-2, 3-4-5, once I caught a fish alive?" It's already happening.

From the baby's first recognition and seeking of familiar patterns; building up and knocking down; playing with blocks; collecting stones, shells and sticks, and so on, children develop simple mathematical concepts through exploration and their innate need for order. It's the hand that develops the brain, not the narrow thinking of specialists. "Teaching" pre-school children is cock-eyed anyway. They mostly learn by and for themselves and are busy internalising a whole universe, which they break down in their own time to form mathematical and other concepts when they are ready. Maria Montessori put it beautifully: "A film is developing in the dark room of young children's minds, and if we call it out too soon, we destroy the film." (Or words to that effect).

K Simpson, Owner/Principal: Studio, Montessori Nursery Centre, Richmond, London

VITAL STATISTICS

Christopher Clayton fell into the trap of quoting raw statistics in his letter on education spending (Letters, EDUCATION&CAREERS, 26 June). Most of us now know that huge amounts go straight to iniquitous private finance initiative schemes and do little to improve frontline services. Remember the quote about Virginia Bottomley when she was a Tory health minister: "She uses statistics as a drunk uses a lamp-post – more for support than illumination."

S Lawton, Kirtlington, Oxon

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