Sorry, I haven't got a cloo...

AND so after six long, wet weeks of summer, we've finally packed the four-year-old off to start school, and a little sanity is being scraped back into our lives.

Of course she loves it and is lapping up every second – at almost five, she was more than ready for full-time education (as were her long-suffering parents), and couldn't wait to get started on learning the three Rs. It didn't take her all that long either.

"I know all about reading and writing now, mummy," our daughter informed me flatly, as we walked out of the school gates following her first (half) day in the classroom. "And I know EVERYTHING about maths."

Great, thought I: she can have immediate responsibility for stretching the bank balance out over an entire month.

Sadly, this initial proclamation turned out to be a slight exaggeration and our child prodigy isn't about to feature in the Daily Mail anytime soon.

But I'm sure she'll get there, as will all her classmates, and it won't be long before they are reading, writing and calculating their sums with ease.

I have every confidence that our daughter's friendly teachers will do a good job of shoehorning all this vital information into her little head.

I just hope they manage to teach her how to spell along the way.

Spelling, it seems, is no longer a priority. Spelling correctly doesn't seem to matter all that much anymore. You could argue this were true based solely on the evidence we are surrounded with – the inaccurately spelt and badly punctuated shop signs, adverts and display boards dotted everywhere are just one example.

Or take a look at the jargon-laden, text-speak gibberish that people spout unashamedly in their handwritten letters, emails and web comments.

Nobody bothers putting an apostrophe anywhere anymore, let alone in the right place, everything deserves a capital letter, and we are clearly all so pushed for time that we should forgive those who knock off consonants, and replace all sorts of letters with a 'z'.

Unless we care, that is. Unless we look at badly punctuated signs advertising Gourmet Pizza's, Todays Special's, and Disco Nite and recoil in horror.

Frustration with failing standards is not new – it's been years since Lynne Truss's little book Eats, Shoots and Leaves was in the Christmas stocking of every dyed-in-the-corduroy academic.

But rather than reversing the trend, it seems we're now being encouraged not to worry about bad spelling by the very people elected to promote the practice.

John Wells, president of the Spelling Society – an organisation which campaigns for spelling reform – spoke out last week to argue that 'text message speak' shouldn't be a cause for concern.

John Wells, an Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London, said such informal language was the "way forward" and even suggested the apostrophe be scrapped.

"Let's not hold up our hands in horror – people should be able to use whichever spelling they prefer," he said.

This academic believes it doesn't matter if you don't know your 'your' from 'you're', or 'their' from 'there' – and we should feel free to mix 'its' and it's' up at will.

Why? Because our English spelling system is a bit confusing, and it places a 'burden' on schoolchildren.

"There are more important things to life," reckons Professor Wells.

Of course there are – but that doesn't mean good spelling is irrelevant.

If we grow up never learning how to correctly punctuate a sentence, and are totally reliant on a computer spell-check, then we struggle. We struggle to get anywhere in life, and we struggle to make ourselves understood.

Text speak is all well and good in a text message, but even then it's sometimes impossible to decipher – I've received many texts from friends which are all but illegible thanks to their being coded in curious shorthand.

Then there's the real world – are we meant to write job applications in gibberish? "Dear sir, I wanz a job wiv u, I's work really ard, just ask my mum's, cheers."

Badly written letters end up in the bin, let alone badly spelt ones.

I care as much as I do because I'm the product of a good, old-fashioned education. Get it right, we were told, and you'll get on in life. Get it wrong, and people will sneer.

And they do sneer – even now, when we're all at it.

I sneered just the other day as I paused in the supermarket to read an advert posted by someone selling a trampoline. I'm in the market for a trampoline – at the right price – so it caught my interest.

'Trampoline for sale', it read. 'Enclood's safety surround. £70'

Now this puzzled me. Did the author intend to write 'includes' safety surround – or 'excludes'? Had they mixed up an 'e' and an 'i', or forgotten an 'x'?

It made a difference – a big difference. If it was 'includes' then it was a reasonable price and I was interested – if 'excludes', then it wasn't, and I wasn't. (And that's without getting to the random apostrophe and the 'oods'...)

Not having the time to work it out, I gave up and walked away – and the sale was lost. Petty maybe, but life is petty.

And I'd really like my daughter to be able to surf through without falling foul of the lazy spelling option.