You can picture the scene in the Beckham household on a typical evening, as the Real Madrid midfielder and England captain pores over his eldest son's Key Stage One maths homework, writes Rebecca Smithers. Six-year old Brooklyn sits nearby at his mini executive desk surfing the internet on his top-of-the-range laptop, as his poor dad struggles to understand number bonds and simple multiplication.
"Their homework is so hard these days", Beckham said in a revealing interview with The Mail on Sunday. "I sat down with Brooklyn the other day - and I was like, 'Victoria, maybe you should do the homework tonight.'" Hmm, an interesting proposition in itself ...
In one of those classic David Beckham-meets-John Prescott phrases, he went on: "It's totally done differently to what I was teached (sic) when I was at school, and you know, I was like, "Oh my God, I can't do this.". 'Apparently he offered to read his son a book instead - probably one of those 'buggy books' dangling from baby Cruz's pushchair.
The Beckhams are, of course, an easy target when it comes to education - or a lack of it. This is the man who has studied Spanish for nearly three years, yet has barely mastered many full sentences. Victoria recently claimed - nay boasted - that she had never read a whole book.
But the revelation will touch a raw nerve with many parents, who find they have been catapulted back to their own schooldays when struggling to help their youngsters with their homework. There is also the thorny question of the 'thin line' between 'helping' a child with their homework and actually doing it for them. The latter has been the subject of a major government inquiry which uncovered huge levels of parental help with homework, from the basics being studied by Brooklyn at his exclusive British school in Madrid right through to secondary school. But parents who give their children no support or help at all also face criticism. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. What IS acceptable practice?
