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Reading Recovery Programme

In my city of Nottingham last year, nearly one in eight 11-year-olds were unable to read the first lesson at secondary school. That is one of the main causes of educational underachievement, exclusions, low attainment, truancy and poor results, yet that social blindness is a wholly preventable disease. The consequences go far wider than education. It may lead to a lifetime of massively expensive antisocial behaviour, ill health, poor skills and job prospects and drug abuse. I refer hon. Members to the work of Heckman, the Nobel-prize-winning economist, done for the Scottish Executive on the economic return on investment in education at different ages in a child’s life. He shows very clearly that the earlier we invest, the more we get for our money. I am happy to supply hon. Members with more details of that work if necessary. One study found that a quarter to a third of 10-year-olds who exhibited antisocial behaviour had a specific reading difficulty. Forty-eight per cent. of the prison population read poorly. Twenty-five per cent. of juveniles in custody have a reading age below that of the average seven-year-old, and so on. We are talking about needlessly broken and wasted lives, but the answers cannot be found through educational remedies alone. Incidentally, I welcome the fact that colleagues from all parties are here today. I intend this to be a wholly non-partisan debate; the subject is too serious for point scoring. I am delighted to see those colleagues and I hope that they will chip in to the debate. The broader causes of the problem have to be addressed by much more effective long-term social policy, focusing on prevention, pre-emption and early intervention. In fact, that is the motto of my local strategic partnership. All the local experts in Nottingham agree. Professor Colin Harrison, who is professor of literacy studies at Nottingham university, states:"““In my view the greatest single strategy the government could adopt to improve literacy standards nationally would be to support parents and carers in these vital first years, developing the excellent work done by the Sure Start programme, and extending it.””" By the age of four, a professional’s child will have heard 50 million words. A working-class child will have heard 30 million. A child on welfare will have heard less than a quarter of the words heard by a professional’s child; 12 million words will have been addressed to the child on welfare. Hart and Risley were amazed at how well their measures of accomplishments at age three predicted language skills at the ages of nine to 10. They concluded that school had added little value after the age of three; it was already too late. That is another argument for early intervention. Dr. Paul Thompson of Nottingham university, once a local head teacher, summed up the situation:"““It is intervention for very young children from poor families that is crucial in raising levels of reading achievement. Children under the age of three need intensive interaction with teachers to make up for what they are not getting at home.””" Nottingham city council’s children’s services director, Edwina Grant, who with her team and with teachers battles these problems every day, says:"““We know that children in Nottingham enter early education with attainment levels well below national expectations, particularly in speaking and literacy.””" That is the raw material that people have to deal with in trying to make progress on educational attainment. When I started, I intended us to have a debate on reading recovery, but I have come rapidly to a different debate about early intervention, for the two are inextricably linked. Some of the interventions needed are obvious. Locally, poor parenting skills can be addressed by early intervention with mothers of children aged zero to two. An example is the nurse-family partnership, which is being promoted, thankfully, through the Government’s social exclusion policy. Our local education authority and the local strategic partnership, One Nottingham, which I chair, have together put an extra £1 million into the teaching of social behaviour in primary schools, building on social and emotional aspects of learning—the SEAL programme—which is rolling out and will soon go to secondary level, I am glad to say. That will help to equip individuals to choose when they have children and, when they themselves are parents, enable them to raise their nought to five-year-olds to be school-ready, rather than starting 10 paces behind the rest. There is a distinct lack of joining up, however. I am told that, locally, the number of health visitors has dropped to its lowest level since 1998. Starting pay for newly qualified health visitors is now set lower than it was previously, and there will be no incentive for nurses with valuable experience to consider entering that part of the profession and working with young people and their parents. Health visitors, community nurses and midwives are one of the keys to the parenting agenda. They have the skills to make assessments of families and their needs. They introduce the Bookstart scheme to families and encourage parents to spend time with their children introducing them to books. For some families in my constituency, that may not be a priority. Domestic violence and child protection feature highly in Nottingham, North, and much of the health visitors’ time is taken up with addressing those issues. That is all the more reason why they should have some focus and some assistance when it comes to the development of parenting skills Other bits of joining up are necessary. Adult basic skills must be properly funded by the Learning and Skills Council. In Nottingham, we must resist the short-sighted proposals to close and asset-strip the only further education base in the UK’s most educationally deprived constituency—my own, Nottingham, North. We must link community-based training much more to our local learning centres. Sure Start, which has been an absolute boon for people who live on the outer estates that I represent, must none the less reach out even further to the hardest-to-contact families and the youngest children. Nationally, the Government have to realise the destructive impact of their target culture. Forcing a chronically educationally underachieving city such as Nottingham to conform to middle England targets and outcomes means that only symptoms, rather than causes, are addressed, so even short-term improvements are not built on firm and sustainable foundations. In those circumstances, the very lowest achieving children do not receive the necessary attention. The focus can be on getting more children who are just a little behind up to the Government level 4 target, leaving the long tail of strugglers to sink. The day job then becomes administering the consequences of underachievement, rather than attacking its origins. In the era of the local Government White Paper, the Lyons review and, possibly, a change of Prime Minister and new ideas, we need locally to have the ambition and freedom to look those problems in the eye and not be looking over our shoulder for central Government approval. In that context, I have a request for my hon. Friend the Minister. I would appreciate knowing the 2006 results for the UK for 11-year-olds getting below level 3 in English nationally, for all children and for boys and girls separately, and the results by local authority. I do not expect the Minister to carry that information around with him, but if he will ask his officials to write to me, I shall be most grateful. I must put on the record the assistance that I have had from and the interaction that I have had with the excellent officials who have worked in the Department. Like all of us, they are trying to find ways to solve these problems. The information that I have asked for does not relate to an official target, yet it is vital for the life chances of youngsters in my constituency. It is not a box to tick—I am not looking for that—but it should be a spur to effective local partnership between our local society, parents and children and the voluntary sector. In the short term, however, we need to add reliable, effective, early interventions, to tackle children’s reading difficulties. That is why I have sought this debate. For many middle England areas, the work that I am concerned with might be dismissed as schemes or projects, but for a deprived area such as my constituency it is bedrock policy—a prerequisite for achievement and, beyond the education silo, a prerequisite for an effective civil society too. What can we do? The Government are doing excellent work to reduce the number of children who struggle with reading, by improving general classroom teaching. I always count blessings in this context, including the attention being paid to class sizes, improvements in attainment levels and the extraordinary change in the numbers achieving five A to C grades; they are very welcome and the Government should be praised for what they have done. I make a point of giving that praise, having to date made some criticisms. The city council in Nottingham is also already doing great work. At the foundation stage great progress is being made with the early reading development pilot, with the result that 56 schools are now involved in the communication, language and literacy development programmes. At key stage 1 Nottingham city is one of the few councils to show progress in reading. At key stage 2 it has made a 4 per cent. gain at level 4. In addition, the intensive support programme and the supporting progress initiative have made substantial gains. The family literacy scheme is doing superb work with parents; literacy volunteers are giving immense support; the Place2B is giving parents an understanding of their children’s reading needs. Other innovations include the ““mega read”” project, linking primaries, secondaries and library services, and the web-based reading resource that will be sent out to all secondary schools in the next two years. All that tremendous effort from the LEA and teachers will make a serious difference to youngsters in my constituency. The children whom I am most concerned about, however, are those who on arrival at school are referred to in report after report by Ofsted as being unable to speak in a sentence or recognise a letter or number, who do not understand what ““word””, ““letter”” or ““page”” mean, and who cannot concentrate in a busy classroom. Those children need full-time, professional reading recovery. It gets 84 per cent. of children back to national average reading levels and sustains that progress. Several parliamentary colleagues present are no doubt from areas where the scheme has been used very successfully. Perhaps I may give an advertisement, since I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) is in her place, for a reception about reading recovery, which is to be held in Parliament next Tuesday; and perhaps if the Minister has not been invited he will still be able to pop in, with other Front Benchers, to add weight to the great work that is being done by the organisation concerned. ““Every child a reader”” projects are operating in many parts of the UK and, indeed, throughout the English-speaking world. They involve a short-term intervention for six-year-olds. Children receive daily 30-minute one-to-one lessons for up to 20 weeks, from a specially trained teacher. The children’s parents or carers are also engaged to support their children’s learning. The approach is one of the cheapest innovations that we can provide. It is an inoculation against a lifetime of illiteracy. Cheap? To give an illiterate, alienated, disruptive 16-year-old a place in a secure unit for a year costs £250,000. Giving that same child, earlier on, by reading recovery, the talent to read—to access the whole world through reading—costs £2,500; so 100 youngsters could be given national level reading ability for the price of picking up the pieces for one child who perhaps did not get the intervention that they needed when they needed it. Reading recovery is not an easy option. It requires initial training for reading recovery teachers, which takes a year. That training continues, so that the teachers can stay at the same high level of skills. I do not disparage at all the fantastic effort of volunteers or teaching assistants in helping youngsters to read. I am concerned with getting the momentum going—with getting the youngsters to a level at which they will benefit even more from those other interventions. Reading recovery was supported by large-scale Government funding, and was then funded by local authorities and school budgets, and through regeneration programmes, but now it needs clarity and direction from Government. It is, in some senses, at a turning point, and it needs Government—and the Minister—to be clear about how the future for reading recovery is seen.