Rather enjoyed this broad ranging article.

I'm not a big Rudd person but putting teachers on notice is a good idea. In my experience, 80 percent of teachers are excellent. 20 percent are time wasters, looking at the clock tick over to superannuation time. Pay them off.

I've worked in education and I had little time for those we used to call the cultural left. Whenever there was a useful curriculum or structural change we'd always hear 'but what about the little children ...' from the cultural left. That simply meant they didn't like it. That was OK but they never, ever, implemented one single positive educational reform.

Don't agree with simplifying the language. 'Their and there' is a nightmare but try learning feminine and masculine forms in Italian or French. It takes a while. It ain't the spelling, it's the context in which the word appears or is used.

I never realised the potentially negative consequences of a forward facing pram or pusher, nor the parallels between weather protection of babies and the silencing of parrots. Illuminating!

Your comments on the absolutely crucial role of interactive speech between adults and babies and, or adults and young children are highly pertinent. The Early Reading Play School encourages parents to tell their children stories as a prior and separate exercise to reading them.

But like Cheryl, I'm no fan either of bad spelling or of reformed spelling, which tends to hide the history of a word.

Provided you have some clues about what you are doing, it is actually so easy to teach a child to read that our current dilemmas in this project verge on criminal neglect.

Rudd's enthusiasm for an education revolution is commendable, but it is not clear that his pursuit of this goal will be successful. We live in hope.