ABSTRACT
Successive governments in England from the 1970s have been concerned that standards in literacy were not sufficiently high. In comparison to other countries there was ‘a long tail of underachievement’. In 1997 63 per cent of children left primary school at 11 years of age with a level 4 and above in English in the national test.1 Reports from the government’s inspectors of schools questioned the focus and quality of teaching. These indicated, for instance, that few schools used a balanced approach to the teaching of reading which included the systematic teaching of phonics and that the teaching of reading consisted of the teacher listening for variable amounts of time to children reading individually. This they described as monitoring rather than teaching in many instances (Ofsted, 1996). There was also considered to be insufficient teaching of writing (Beard, 1999; Literacy Task Force, 1997; also see Beard, this volume).
