ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an informed account of the ways in which the current cross-sectoral crisis in English can be traced back to both the National Curriculum and more significantly the advent of the ‘Literacy Hour’, the epicentre of New Labour’s focus on raising standards in literacy. This “assault on poor literacy standards required the most ambitious large-scale strategy of education reform since the 1960s” (Fullan, 2000: 102), but as the chapter argues, “Getting the basics right” had far-reaching, unintended implications. For as the literacy curriculum focused on a return to basics, over time literacy was reduced to ‘basic skills’, which could be more easily measured than the broader, more complex conception of literacy that many believed to be a more accurate description of literacy.
The author draws on her experience as a primary teacher, ‘who developed a love of teaching English’, and as a literacy coordinator, who was handed ‘The Suitcase’– a handy carrying case containing all of the training materials for whole-school policy implementation. This chapter argues that the long-term damage inflicted by the ideology of ‘informed prescription’, telling teachers what to do and how to do it, has led us to our current plight. The author evokes the Framework for teaching literacy which contained 1024 learning objectives and launched the daily literacy hour, divided into segments of time for word-, sentence- and text-level work. It argues that this was the route taken by those wanting standardised delivery and new literacy pedagogies such as guided reading and writing. The author argues that in order to teach the enormous number of learning objectives, teachers resorted to teaching text extracts rather than sharing whole texts with children which may have led to the decrease in children reading for pleasure in subsequent years.
