Last summer one in four children left primary school unable to read well (DfE, 2017). This means that over 150,000 children started secondary school in the Autumn without the basic reading skills needed to access the curriculum. For many of these children, without gaining fluency in reading, they may never catch up; they enter secondary school with low self- esteem and a lack of confidence in their own abilities. By the time they leave secondary school, their chances of a successful and fulfilling life will have been greatly reduced; some will not have mastered the basic levels of literacy to gain sustainable employment. Too many children in this country are being left behind at a young age. It does not have to be like this; with the right approach in school and the support of their parents and carers, the multiple barriers that some children face are easily disassembled. We know that getting children reading from a young age and into the habit of reading every day, will help to improve their imagination and communication skills and brighten their future prospects.
Literacy levels and reading in disadvantaged communities
For children growing up in low income communities, the situation is worse; it is estimated that up to two in five children have difficulties with literacy. This gap opens early. Toddlers and other vulnerable children from disadvantaged communities, can be many months behind their more advantaged peers in terms of language proficiency. They are less likely to have parents who read to them or simply talk to them. Save the Children (2014) highlighted the main routes to poor reading skills by age 11: poor language development up to the age of 5 and poor progress in reading between 5 and 11 years.
Speech, language and communication are a central area for children’s development in early education. Hart and Risley’s (1995) landmark study in America highlighted the big gap in children’s vocabulary at age 3; they found that children from disadvantaged homes had far fewer words than their more advantaged peers. Blanden and Mackin (2010) suggest that 3-year-old children from disadvantaged backgrounds are as much as 10 months behind their more advantaged peers in vocabulary development and 15 months behind at age 5. Literacy is as much about speech, language and communication as it is about reading and writing. Parents and carers contribute to this when they talk to and with their young children, read to them or tell them stories; they help to construct the foundational blocks for a lifetime of reading well.
The Raising Early Achievement in Literacy (REAL) project carried out in Sheffield more than twenty years ago with pre-school children and their families, still resonates today. The three and four-years-old in the intervention group had better achievement in language and literacy than non-intervention children, and, even more, for children of mothers with no qualifications, the benefits extended to the age of seven (Nutbrown et. al., 2005). Parental engagement, particularly in the early years, is still the single most important contributory factor to children’s development, well-being and achievement.
Recently, the National Literacy Trust, working with Experian, identified areas in England most at risk of literacy problems. What they found, was that although low levels of literacy are found in areas of the country with high unemployment, multiple low income households and social problems, they are not confined to these areas. They are present in small pockets, in almost every community across the country and are often intergenerational; 86% of all constituencies have at least one ward with serious literacy problems (Douglas, 2017). For children in some of the most disadvantaged communities, the chances are that their parents cannot read; data shows that around 35% of adults in some of the deprived wards of the UK have the reading skills of an 11-year-old (BIS, 2011). Earlier research for the Read On Get On campaign, set up in 2014, by a coalition of organisations committed to a 2025 goal of every child reading well by age 11 found that children from low income families in rural areas, market towns and coastal areas are more likely to be poor readers.
What the research shows is the need for a continuing focus on supporting children’s reading; areas which have seen rapid progress in children’s reading skills over recent years have not have not always been able to sustain it (Save the Children, 2014). Reading and reading well is everyone’s business.