Reading for fun vital to excellence in English, finds Ofsted
Schools need to encourage pupils to read for fun to achieve outstanding standards in English, the education watchdog said today.
Ofsted analysed how 12 schools accomplished "excellence" in the subject and found that all had a curriculum that "gave a high profile to reading for pleasure".
It noted that international surveys such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) found that although most pupils in England were competent readers by secondary age, their "interest and commitment" to reading was declining "substantially".
"Schools that take the business of reading for pleasure seriously, where teachers read, talk with enthusiasm and recommend books, and where provision for reading is planned carefully, are more likely to succeed with their pupils' reading," Ofsted's report says.
The recommendation comes a week after The TES revealed that the Government's national curriculum review is considering an approved list of authors for primary schools.
Education secretary Michael Gove recently said "our children should be reading 50 books a year".
Ofsted found that one of its case study schools, Clifton Green Primary in York, felt that "investment in the enjoyment of reading turns average readers into keen ones".
Pupils' home-school reading journals were checked by staff at the school and all classes collectively read two or three substantial works of fiction a year.
All pupils, from foundation stage upwards, borrowed from the school's library of more than 14,000 books. As a result, independent reading was popular with boys and girls. Clifton Green also holds authors' visits; Ofsted identified such activities as another important element in schools' success.
Last month, writers including Michael Rosen, Ian McMillan and Jackie Kay joined English teachers in criticising the Arts Council for cutting its grant to the National Association of Writers in Education, which trains writers to work in schools.
The National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) said it was sad, angry and frustrated at the "short-sighted decision".
The Ofsted report, Excellence in English, also recommends good-quality oral work to engage pupils "who might otherwise take little interest" in English.
"Talk happens in all English lessons but it is not always well structured or taught explicitly," it says.
Comment (4)
Teachers would not have to work so hard at getting pupils to enjoy reading if learning to read English was not so difficult. It is because so many English spellings have several sounds - http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2009/12/reading-problems.html - and make the acquisition of this skill exceptionally long and tedious that English-speaking pupils do not fall in love with reading as readily as they do in other languages.
Phonic inconsistencies like 'on - only, once, other' mean that in the initial teaching of reading children have to be shielded from them. They have spend a long time learning to read not with real texts, but specially contrived - and invariably tedious - phonically regular ones. By the time they get exposed to normal stories, many children have been put off reading for life.
The simplest way of ensuring that more English-speaking children become avid readers would be to modernise English spelling - at least sufficiently to make learning to read substantially easier and faster.
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11:28
15 May, 2011
mashabell
I read this on the same day that I learn yet another school is making its librarian redundant and replacing its library with e-books, hot on the heels about the news of Wellington College's decision to sideline its library in favour of iPads and feng shui. There is a substantial body of research about the positive impact of reading for pleasure on pupil attainment across the curriculum, and about the positive impact of a well run school library on school achievement. Yet headteachers continue to make short sighted and ill informed decisions based on the misconception that 'everything is on the Internet'. Librarians and school libraries are more important than ever; a school library is not - and never has been - a storehouse for books but a place where information and fiction, in whatever form, is organized and made accessible to pupils and staff.
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16:23
19 May, 2011
dewey027
I have just started doing a supported experiment doing one-to-one reading with adults. I was quickly able to see the add-on value to learners' skills. The importance of reading for pleasure should never be underestimated.
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21:54
20 May, 2011
rodgera
I'm glad to see that schools are having to make librarians redundant while Ofsted are regurgitating other people's findings:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13393321
and see The Reader in the Writer by Myra Barrs.
Mashabell: if changing the whole English language is our 'simplest' way forward, then we really are done for. I've never heard anything so ridiculous.
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10:23
21 May, 2011
londone3