ABSTRACT
When children can read at an expert level, a whole world is opened up to them. When children enjoy reading and want to read, they can choose to enter that whole new world. The reason reading across subjects is so important is that we pick up a lot of background knowledge through general reading. One of the reasons children from middle-class backgrounds do so much better in education is because they have denser general knowledge. But reading is not only about fiction. Definitely not. If children only read fiction, they will never broaden their knowledge. The children were painfully weak at reading. One student would auto-correct words she didn’t know, rendering sentences essentially meaningless. A small but significant group of pupils in many secondary schools, in particular those in deprived areas, arrive in year 7 being unable to read.
