This is the story of a mystery.
It begins with a consensus view that if, as a child, you read widely and often, you will do very well at school. This is not a mystery and can be explained by the fact that schools are places that talk about the world in the kinds of ways that you find in books. This is both in the nature of the language used and the cadences of the written language along with the levels of abstraction, complexity and multiplicity of viewpoint to be found in many kinds of extended prose.
The government, through its education department, has declared itself on many occasions to be utterly serious about helping every child to do well at school and that this is predicated on knowing how to read. With this in mind they have invested huge amounts of money in the National Literacy Strategy and, more recently, a systematic method of teaching literacy known as "synthetic phonics". Alongside this they have voiced an interest in encouraging the reading of books for pleasure, but have singularly failed to back it up with the same kind of stick they have brought to bear on the Literacy Strategy and the implementation of synthetic phonics.
Instead, what they have done is to pass responsibility on to a proliferation of voluntary bodies who advocate reading for pleasure at home and school - utterly admirable bodies and campaigns like Booktrust, the Children's Laureateship, National Literacy Trust, the Voluntary Reading Scheme, the Family Reading Campaign, the National Year of Reading, Summer Reading Challenge, Reading is Fundamental and so on. This is the mystery. Why is all this in the voluntary sector? Why is the support for something that everyone agrees is absolutely crucial to education and school achievement so quiet and tucked-away?
So, we might ask, why is it that when Ofsted descend on a school with their checklist of what a school should be doing, it doesn't include an evaluation of how the school manages reading for pleasure both in the school and in the children's homes? Why is it that central government is quite capable of demanding that local governments do what central government wants them to do, but doesn't insist on them implementing programmes of joined-up action between libraries, schools and homes?
Or to put it more crudely, why does this Labour government not consider that to do all this would be a vote-winner? A tentative answer from me is that at the heart of this government, Blunkettism persists. This is the notion that talking tough about children and education is what wins Labour support. And yet, producing a thorough programme in which schools are the vital element in creating children and families who choose to read, seems to be beyond them.
