http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20346204

I don't know if this is sensationalist reporting or actually a real problem - 29,000 pupils out of 1,100 schools is, what, about 3-4% ?

I want to say I'm not surprised, given the seemingly widespread piss-poor grammatical skills I've witnessed; but I really don't know what the 'normal' rate of academically deficient students per school is.

If gcses have become easier year on year, I can't even begin to imagine how they are now given how simple they were when I took them 18 years ago*.

*I ought to point out I didn't do particularly well, they were just piss easy and if I'd done some revision I would like to think I'd have done well.

This has been a perennial problem of slipping standards. A few years ago there was a comparison of exams from the 1920's and from the last couple of years. The recent exams were easy, the older exams were tough. Both a friend and I sat through them and did well on the newer tests but found the older tests much tougher, even though we both had been out of school many years. I think part of the problem comes down to stats and league tables. Schools teach to beat the tables and so a lot of additional teaching is now abandoned. Also grammar has been abandoned, and many kids can only write in txtspeak.

+1 for modern technology. It's bad enough people can't spell because of textspeak but IMO memory is going to deteriorate too. Who needs to remember facts when you can look online for the answer? Hell, I used to remember peoples' telephone numbers but can't anymore because I rely on mobile phones to do it. Imagine a whole population of fifty-year olds with memory problems.

I am well ahead of you there!

This. Even after 6 and a half years, I still don't knoq my wife's mobile number without looking it up.

Autocorrect FTW

I do not know my mobile number, after seven years.

Are parents not stopping to think 'Hang on, our young 'un here doesn't seem to be quite as sharp as they should be. Maybe I should try something to change that.'
Clue: More time in front of a screen isn't the answer.

No.

Frankly.

Falling standards are due multipul exams boards competing with each other for school's 'business'. Simple as.

Sorry, but that's nonsense. The standards a student is required to meet has nothing to do with the exam board. The 5 exam boards all have a common standard and regulations to adhere to.
The number of students that apparently can't read has nothing to do with the exam board, and frankly, everything to do with the input they receive from home coupled with a culture where teachers are spending more time on paperwork and less time effectively meeting the student's needs.

Bull. I know full well our school switched exam boards for French to make it easier to pass. They were quite open about it at the time.
To get the business, them make it a tad easier than the competition, then they do the same etc etc.
If they had one exam board for the entire country, then standards could be maintained.

On a similar note, our A-level geology teacher had over 25 years of past papers. You could more or less order them by date based on how hard they were.
(But to be fair the A-level physics papers didn't change much over 20 years).

Be that as may, there's the same criteria to be met.
As I also said, the amount of paperwork teachers are expected to do - and bear in mind that there's now no such thing as a 'satisfactory' report from Ofsted but 'needs improvement' instead - can you blame a school for making a move to an exam board that then creates a more manageable work load for the teaching staff? The rise in class size means the amount of time spent marking rises.
So you've a situation where there's more students, more marking, an inspector demanding more evidence and timetabling lessons to the minute for some nebulous 'standard British child', and you be the schools will go with the board that eases their way.
That doesn't mean that criteria will be lower, but perhaps how those criteria are judged.

Be that as may, I fail to see how the influence of an exam board allows children are getting as far as GCSE with a reading age of 10-11.
Oversubscribed teaching staff and a lackadaisical attitude from parents - that's what gives you children who can't read, not an exam board.

Most families barely have any books. So reading at home is rare and unless you read for fun you do not get the experience of reading and all that it entails.