THE Government now wants all schools to teach children how to cook and prepare healthy food.

As with sport and games, this is exactly what all good schools used to do, before the narrow National Curriculum was forced upon them by the "experts".

I think that many people would ultimately benefit if "handling money, cash and financial awareness" were taught at school.

Almost our entire nation is in debt and young children are bombarded by adverts to buy things.

Many young people know how to access credit and if their parents refuse to buy them something on the grounds of not having enough money, quite a few know how to get in touch with money lenders.

Sadly, we live in a very consumer-motivated society and banks, shops and companies and especially supermarkets, know only too well how to get hold of our cash, because so many people are ignorant about basic home economy and the pitfalls that we can so easily tumble in to.

Students go to universities and are almost immediately plunged in to debt, get involved with student loans and other less honourable forms of credit, which is not good, and the position will get markedly worse as the Government keeps striving for that ridiculous target of 50 per cent of school leavers going to university.

We need to sit back and have a rethink.

David Quarrie, Lynden Way, Acomb, York.