ABSTRACT
Too many children leave primary schools in the UK still struggling with reading and writing. It is not a new phenomenon. Discussing national surveys, Greg Brooks refers to: ‘a survey of adults of different ages in 19923 which found a low attaining minority among 72-74 year olds, who were born around 1920 and entered school around 1925’. (NFER News, 1998)
Another survey by NFER (Brooks, 1998) found that reading standards had remained stable from 1948 to 1996 but referred to ‘the long tail of underachievement’ – a substantial minority in each generation who struggle with reading (international comparisons seem to show other countries with much lower rates of reading failure). The current government has translated this problem into percentages of children in England and Wales who attain national curriculum level 4 at the end of their primary schooling, setting these countries the task of raising the percentage of children who achieve this level from 63 per cent to 80 per cent in 2002. The aim is a major cut in the numbers of struggling readers in a short period of time – and a clear strategy to achieve this: The National Literacy Strategy. Will it work? Some clues are to be found in the evaluation of the National Literacy Project that preceded it (Ofsted, 1998). While this was very positive it did not paint a totally clear picture. In general:
Pupils showed a significant rise in their average standardised reading scores … Although their reading test scores were well below the national average at the start of the Project, their scores were much closer to the national average at the end of five terms.
