Spelling – overtaut?

At the time of writing this, most British school children have missed six weeks of valuable school time. (Some have missed more if their family had to start self-isolation before the official lockdown). This is a surely a particularly good time to think about making the best use of our teaching time when we get those children back into school. Fussing over spelling errors is not the best use. I do not propose that we now change every word in our language to follow a few very basic spelling rules. That would clearly result in a clunky, ugly language with too many words looking exactly the same (reed/read, no/know) and the loss of clues to their origin (to change ‘heir’ to ‘air’ would obscure its link to heritage/inheritance). But I believe the teaching profession should start lobbying The Powers That Be to officially simplify the spelling of some commonly used words which are spelled in a way that is, frankly, daft. The word ‘friend’ could easily lose the ‘i’ without