Children's column: Making time for whole books

Written by Nicolette Jones

Friday, 04 September 2009 09:18

We may have reached a turning point in the crusade to encourage the reading of whole books in schools. Independent research commissioned by Heinemann and announced yesterday revealed that 600,000 children never read a complete book at school, and over 1.1 million study only one book in class in the course of a year. Nearly two thirds of teachers feared that the worksheet culture, of reading only snippets of books, would put children off reading – and one in five said they had seen evidence of this happening already. Meanwhile, private schools are twice as likely as state schools to read complete books. Parents were also polled: 84% believed being read to in class had fed their love of reading, and 94% of them were in favour of whole book reading in class.

In conjunction with the research, Heinemann has launched Literacy Evolve, a commercial venture (more than two years in the planning) that offers teachers a range of resources to make their schools into whole-book-reading schools. There is a free DVD, books suitable for each year (12 books for KS2) plus whole collections by poets (felt to encourage pupils to get to know a “voice” in a way that individual poems don’t) and eight short films to encourage boys in particular to get into stories, as well as teachers’ resources for whiteboard technology, including films of poets talking about what they write and why, and i-planners that allow teachers to tailor a lesson plan to their pupils.

Former Laureate Michael Rosen has given his support to the project, and the website includes his tips for a Reading Revolution in schools. Schools can also sign up for his free seminars, being held around the country. Five hundred schools signed up even before the project was officially announced.

The timing of this project coincides with a certain increase in freedom in the curriculum, enabling teachers to make time for books in a way that has sometimes been difficult in the past. The website has the advantage of offering appropriate books, and ways to use them, even to teachers who may not have been trained to have an extensive knowledge of modern children’s literature.

The benefits of reading complete books, which ignite children’s passion for reading in a way that excerpts can never do, go beyond the pleasure denied to children fed only worksheets. As Mary Hamley, publisher of Literacy Evolve, points out, they include "a greater facility with language and increased vocabulary, personal development and other benefits across the curriculum". And reading complete books encourages sustained concentration. As Frank Cottrell Boyce (who is among the authors with books in the scheme) puts it: "I want to know that when I’m old, there are going to be people who can do cardiac surgery without having to twitter every five minutes. We get that kind of long term concentration and the ability to hold ideas in our heads from reading stories."

This column may sound like an ad for a commercial product; but the product, and the thinking behind it, are sufficiently important for otherwise independent authors also to be supporting it. If it, and the practice it promotes, catch on, the benefits for education, for writers and the publishing industry, for society, and for the children – especially those in the state system disadvantaged by having less access to the enrichment of books, will be immense. We need such developments as this, and should cheer their existence.

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