Let us be properly ambitious emerging from the 2020 interruptions to schooling. But we must break this cycle of a sizeable section of the young population growing up with faltering language skills. Asking a school to set out just one catch-up priority at the start of 2021 would be unhelpful. In my time at the National Literacy Trust, I used to give talks entitled ‘Have you ever met a mugger who’s read Middlemarch?’ This was my way of affirming that whatever else we do for children and young people in classrooms, we must give them the dignity of being able to speak, read and write with fluency to make their way in the endlessly fascinating global society which they inhabit.Ī political leader once said that the word ‘priority’ should not be used in the plural. It is a poignant reminder that basic literacy is a birthright that should be denied nobody. All educators should spend time in the education department of one of Her Majesty’s prisons. I began my working life in education in H.M.
The psychologist Steven Pinker remarked that while children are wired for sound, print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on. Only in rare circumstances do humans not learn to speak, and this is true across cultures. The linguist Noam Chomsky identified that every human has an innate language acquisition device.
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Yet in our wealthy nation, with its long history of free education, we still have one in four of our 11 year-olds not meeting expected national standards in reading – and a similar percentage not achieving a grade 4 in English GCSE.Īnd what will months of interrupted schooling mean for all children and young people with their reading development? Reading is the golden key to accessing the rest of the school curriculum and a lifetime’s opportunities.
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