Encouraging children to read shouldn’t be seen as optional by parents - Jayne Dowle

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), published every five years, finds that England has risen from eighth to fourth place, behind Singapore in first, Hong Kong in second and Russia in third.

Immediately, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he welcomed the findings, adding that pushing up literacy rates was central to the government’s plans to grow the economy. “These results also show a welcome narrowing in the attainment gap between boys and girls and the highest and lowest performing pupils,” he said. “This shows that our approach is working.”

“Our approach”? Mr Sunak can hardly take credit, given that it was reported in November last year that teaching unions say in his own constituency, Richmond in North Yorkshire, four schools will have lost more than £100,000 in the year from April this year, with 40 seeing reductions of more than £100 per pupil. About 75 per cent of schools in his constituency face some cuts, the unions’ calculations found.

If I was a teacher in any one of England’s under-funded and unappreciated state-funded schools, I’d be seething at Mr Sunak’s ownership of this global achievement. An intense focus on reading and literacy was a keystone for Michael Gove when he was Education Secretary, so if the Government can take any credit at all, it should thank him, but he left that post in 2014.

However, for almost a decade now, under successive Tory governments, the Department for Education has lurched from crisis to lethargy, with Gavin Williamson’s tenure during the pandemic being especially laced with dangerous levels of chaos and complacency.

How dare the PM assume responsibility for our children’s world-beating reading ability? It’s got very little to do with Number 10, and is instead down to the dogged efforts of teachers, school leaders and parents, and the children of course, who may struggle with phonics and rather do anything than sit down with a book, but generally soldier on and do their best.

However, it’s true that England rose in the ranking not because its performance improved - it actually declined by one point - but because that of countries such as Finland and Poland, which had previously done better than England, declined.

As this study took account of the pandemic time period, the results bear out other pieces of UK research showing that our children definitely did read more when they were locked down at home, away from other distractions.

However, it would seem that the overall trend was for children to read independently, rather than being supervised and guided by their parents. This concerns Dr Dirk Hastedt, executive director of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, which oversees Pirls.

He’s not only worried at the yawning literacy gaps between girls and boys – he and other experts are calling for schools to hold more books with subject matter attractive to lads – but thinks parents may need to step up their game.

“We see that parents, also, in a lot of cases, are not really interested in reading and there is a huge correlation between parents not liking reading and their children’s achievement,” he says. “We need to look at this for the whole of society, not just schools, to emphasise reading and role models.”

So whilst England’s outstanding performance is certainly cause for rejoicing, it does come with caveats. My fear is that ‘reading’ is one of those things that modern parenting will simply end up seeing as optional.

Call me old-fashioned, but until they were six or seven, I read to both my children every night.

I enjoyed the time we sat down together at the end of what were always busy days, and hoped I would pass on my love of reading to both of them. Neither, I have to admit, picks up a book without strong persuasion, but I live in hope that like gardening, literature will become one of those inherited pastimes they turn to in later years. Because sadly, our children might be good at it, but reading is not a popular activity of choice; only 29 per cent of English children said that they “very much enjoy” reading, putting England 42 out of 57 countries on this measure.