Pressing Matters

According to research from the National Literacy Trust, there are now almost four million children in the UK who do not own a book, which works out at roughly one in three. Seven years ago it was one in 10, so it’s a massive decline.

Should we be worried? The obvious answer is yes.

The report shows that the number of books in the home is directly linked to children’s reading levels: more books = better readers.

The Trust’s research also reveals that:

• 43% of boys say they enjoy reading, compared with 58% of girls
• 19% of boys say they only read in class, while just 11% of girls agree with this statement
• 24% of boys think reading is boring, compared with 13% of girls
• 45% of girls like going to the library, while only 35% of boys do

But perhaps the decline in book-reading isn’t quite as bad as it appears on the surface, although I’ll be the first to admit that it does look quite troubling. Even so, books are very much ‘last century’. Everything is digital now - just like film has disappeared for cameras, and vinyl for music, so paper is on the way out. We really shouldn’t be surprised that children don’t own physical books any more.

My wife owns a Kindle and while I [a book enthusiast] find it soulless and aesthetically devoid of any kind of appeal with its dull greyness and Victorian screen saver, she loves it. And this is despite our one-year-old vomiting all over it [that’s my boy] and ruining the integrated light that was housed in its lime-green cover.

If the Kindle had a bit more character or style in its appearance I might be converted to its undoubted practicality. But it doesn’t, so I’m not. However, while I still buy books and lug them into work in the hope I might get 15 minutes to read them on the train, she has her dinky little e-book thing, and carries hundreds of ‘books’ around with her as if she were Hercules.

I suspect that if you ask her in a year’s time if she owns any books, the answer will probably be ‘no’, yet she will still be an avid reader. Our son, incidentally, has lots of books. Currently, he prefers to eat them than to read, but we hope that situation will change with the passing months.

Yet somehow, I suspect it may not. He is fascinated by our mobiles, laptops and Kindle and much more likely to read on screen. Books may not be able to hold his attention.

It’s because ‘once upon a time’, as most children’s books used to start [and by the way, what a meaningless statement this is – how can anything be ‘upon a time’?] there were few other ways of conveying stories and providing knowledge, entertainment and escapism. Not to mention keeping children quiet for a few hours. But now there are hundreds of means: TV, video, DVD, computer games, websites, movies and so on.

The change can already be seen in our schools. Don’t forget that there’s a primary school in Bolton where all the students have been given iPods and if nothing else convinces schools to ditch printed books, then the economic argument – the cost of buying text books versus the download costs – will eventually win the day.

I think it’s a shame, but we’re fast approaching a time when we may not actually need books to foster reading any more.

Perhaps the two are unrelated, but the vote by teaching unions to strike on 30 November has been followed with almost indecent haste by an article from Prime Minister David Cameron in the Daily Telegraph in which he vents his fury on schools.

Not all schools of course. Free schools are exempt from his spleen. This is partly because they haven’t got off the ground yet, but also because they are the Government’s prized ‘shock troops of innovation’. Instead, Mr Cameron is furious with ‘coasting schools’ and has vowed to ‘shame’ them.

Personally, I’ve no idea what the phrase ‘shock troops of innovation’ actually means and I suspect no one in Government does either, but it sounds dramatic. In fact it sounds very military, as does much of the language Mr Cameron uses. There’s also ‘war zone’, ‘smashing through’, ‘entrenched failure’ and ‘shining a spotlight on complacency’.

As the article appeared on 12 November, perhaps we can attribute this to a weekend spent at Remembrance functions, but it also ties in with the creation of the Phoenix Free School in Manchester. 

In September, the school’s patron, Lord Guthrie – a former chief of the defence staff (‘top General’ in layman’s terms) – called for a generation of schools to be modeled on the Armed Forces – ‘to create a culture of respect among children from the toughest and roughest backgrounds’.

To be fair to the PM, this is a clear example of ‘innovation’ and ‘troops’ – and there will undoubtedly be a shock or two in store for the students. So that’s that part of his message cleared up.

Anyway, back to his gripe – coasting schools. There is apparently a ‘hidden crisis in our schools’. This relates to schools in the shire counties where half the children get five good GCSEs. It’s a problem because at Mossbourne Academy in Hackney, they’ve achieved this standard with more than four fifths of their pupils.

Partly as a result, Mossbourne’s head, Sir Michael Willshaw, will shortly become the new head of Ofsted. “He’s one of the finest head teachers this country has had,” says Mr Cameron, with just a hint of sucking up. And Sir Michael has ‘coasting schools in his sights’, said the PM, in yet another military metaphor.

Cynics among those who responded to the article [there were 152 comments from readers at the time of writing] noted that one or two of those who supported Mr Cameron had a history of posting several hundred and even thousands of comments on the site.

Could they be employed by Government to refute negative postings, they wondered? Certainly one had posted 2,664 comments on a variety of subjects and 23 over the course of the past 24 hours. The obvious conclusions are that these people are passionate about education, very opinionated and with a lot of time on his hands - or that something more sinister is going on.

The same could almost be said of Mr Cameron. He’s passionate about education, has strong opinions and employs minions to write articles while he’s at Remembrance events. Surely there’s nothing more sinister than a desire to improve education and raise standards?

An article in the Guardian caught my eye yesterday (Thursday, 18 November). “Unruly pupils 'hidden' from Ofsted inspectors” claimed the headline. 

There were a few things I wondered about as I read it. The first was related to Tom Trust, a witness to the mass hidings.

He is a ‘former elected member of the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE)’.

Why, I wondered, was he saying all this now? Didn’t Mr Trust feel like making this kind of comment when he was at the GTCE and it was a fully functioning (well, you know) body?

But perhaps he did and no-one listened.

The second individual quoted was Sue Cowley, ‘an educational author and trainer’, who is perhaps known best as the author of ‘Getting the buggers to behave’. She advocated Ofsted inspectors turning up at schools unannounced to stop this kind of misbehaviour from school leaders.

Perhaps if Ofsted inspections were more supportive, less punitive and more consistent in their approach this might not be the worst idea in the world, but I can’t see it being welcomed with open arms.

Incidentally, I should point out that her book title refers to pupils, not school leaders.

But the most wonderment came from the journalist’s statement that “more than one-in-five schools was judged to be either "satisfactory" or "inadequate" in terms of pupil behaviour by Ofsted last year.”

Why on earth, I wondered, would you lump together ‘satisfactory’ with ‘inadequate’?

If a school is satisfactory, then it meets requirements. It’s a pass. Inadequate, however, is a fail.

As a reader, I’m left clueless as to how many are ‘failing’. It might be one in 10 or it might be one in 2000. The author’s clear implication is that satisfactory isn’t good enough. Yet the word means ‘good enough’.

If I was a school leader I’d be pulling my hair out. I might even be tempted to misbehave.

You know the funny thing about coincidences? People draw significance from them. So, when Conservative MP William Hague, now the foreign secretary, shared a twin room with a senior aide while on the political campaign trail, few would have taken too much notice.

They were fighting the ‘austerity election’ and it came fairly soon after the expenses scandal in which our elected representatives were found to have little shame when it came to grabbing every penny they could while those who knew better looked the other way.

Who wants to look like a spendthrift prima donna who insists on their own room in those circumstances?

Then came the photographs which showed Mr Hague walking down the street with said aide. It has to be acknowledged that the pair did look a little camp. Nothing wrong with that, but when seen alongside the room-sharing it does become cause for sniggering. That’s the coincidence factor for you.

Strange then, that on the same day the William Hague story broke (mainly because he issued a statement to stress that his marriage was strong and he hadn’t ever been in a relationship with another man), so did the story that, in Australia, a primary school head teacher had decided that his pupils should no longer sing the line: “Gay your life must be,” when singing the classic kids song, Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree.

Garry Martin, the head at Lapage Primary in Melbourne, took the decision to change the line to: “Fun your life must be.”

The Melbourne Age reported the head as saying: "All I was doing, relatively innocently, was substituting one word because I knew if we sing `Gay your life must be,' the kids will roll around the floor in fits of laughter."

He added that his pupils sometimes used the word ‘gay’ in a disparaging way. "For example, if a boy is not particularly good at sport and they will refer to that child as gay," he said. "It was just a decision that I thought would minimise a disruptive atmosphere."

Coincidences, eh? “Gay is bad and something to be sniggered at,” is the message from opposite ends of the earth, from our political leaders, and our school leaders.

Mr Martin has subsequently been criticised for insulting gay people and even for ‘violating the copyright’ of the song.

The senior aide to William Hague has resigned.

And across the English-speaking world it’s all served to reinforce the behaviour of children (and adults) who use ‘gay’ as an insult.

It’s such a shame.