The student who posited the original question is not planning a flight across the alps. He's a pre-solo student who is looking forward to his initial cross country experiences.
Your citation regarding UK pilots having insufficient navigation skills is more than adequate indictment against introducing crutches such as GPS too early in the training environment. Most certainly it's a highly useful navigational tool, but does not supplant basic, ground-level learning.
That's the subject for the original poster, and the point of this thread: learning basic nav. There is no need to short-cut that learning by allowing a crutch in the classroom, just yet.