ABSTRACT
A note, first, about the literacy hour. The National Literacy Project was set up in 1996 to ‘raise standards of literacy in primary schools in line with national expectations and to meet the Government’s targets by the year 2002 by improving the school’s [sic-not the teachers’] management of literacy through target setting linked to systematic planning, monitoring and evaluation by headteachers, senior staff and governors; setting clear expectations bench-marked in a term-by-term structure’. Later, in January 1998, David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, told teachers that work on literacy should be increased by one hour a day, and other subjects should be reduced.
