ABSTRACT
Inside current concern about the effectiveness of different approaches to the teaching of reading in the early years of school lies a problem of long standing: the markedly different rates of success in learning to read experienced by children from different social groups. This problem has been largely hidden in recent years by a government whose 'league table' ideology denies the importance of social difference. The path it has taken has been to retreat into a view of learning to read as the mastery of a neutral technology.
