"Mrs Turno, of west London, said: "The teachers say it is the new way and if the answer is wrong it doesn't matter as long as she is using the right method. It's quite bizarre."
Telling isn't it? The annointed ones test their absurd theories on the rest of us and when you raise an entire generation of idiots they'll blame everything and everybody (except themselves)
Go to any engineering school...you'll see the same thing, with very good reason. It's quite easy when doing complex calculations to miss a decimal point or transcribe a 1 into a 7 (depending on your personal printing). The point is that as long as the process is correct, experience will tell if the answer makes sense or not. If the process is correct and the same every time, the answers will generally be correct, if an answer doesn't make sense, commonly off by a factor of 2 or 10, you can go back through your steps and see where the error was made.
Now the specific methods, I learned multiplication the correct way, long division, etc. I whole-heartedly endorse those methods and on many of my class notes you will find long division or multiplication calculations scribbled into the margins when I'm too lazy to pull out a calculator. These algorithms are meant as shortcuts for experienced mathematicians (or students) not as a way of teaching the fundamentals.