ABSTRACT
Most parents and professional educators would expect that achieving competence in literacy and numeracy is at the heart of the primary school curriculum: its core business. Unlike secondary subject specialists, whose opinions vary widely on the centrality of literacy in different subject areas, primary schools have generally accepted that literacy and language are powerful components in promoting and reinforcing all learning. Even so, observations of primary classrooms which we reported in Chapter 1, suggest that some children may spend only a few minutes a week reading, whilst the amount of curriculum time devoted to literacy-related tasks diminishes in some cases to a fraction, as children move through the primary school (Raban, 1991; Allington, 1984; Galton et al, 1980). Reports which have recently been commissioned by the DfE (DES, 1992; OFSTED, 1994) confirm a considerable variation in the amount of time spent by primary teachers on literacy and numeracy.
