---

Reading Recovery Programme

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr. O’Hara. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on securing this debate on a subject that is crucial not only to my constituency, but nationally. Initially, I want to say a little about where I come from on the issue and about the issues in my constituency. I have been interested in the issue of reading and children since I became a secondary school governor in the early 1990s. I went into a special educational needs class and saw 11-year-olds struggling to read books that normal five and six-year-olds would have no struggle reading. At that point, I thought that I really needed to see what was going on in our primary schools, so I became a primary school governor and served as one for nine years. Since then, as a mother and an MP, I have seen how Sure Start, quality under-fives provision, literacy hour and reading recovery have made a difference. Before he became Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend said that his priorities were ““education, education, education””, and that script could have been written for Hackney. The challenges in Hackney schools and among Hackney’s children were, and still are, many. Population turnover is high and ranges from 25 to 30 per cent. of the total population. That does not affect all schools, but it does affect a number. Only last summer, I visited a school with my noble Friend Lord Adonis, who is Minister with responsibility for London schools. Fewer than 20 per cent. of the year 6 pupils at that school had been there since reception. The school was in the middle of some dense council estates, and people were trying to find a way to move and leave the school. That created huge challenges not only for that school, but for many others. Hackney also has higher than average numbers of children with English as a second language and on free school meals. In addition, there has been a lack of investment in school buildings over the years. It is worth paying tribute to the work done in my area by the London borough of Hackney, which has had its problems in the past. However, under the leadership of Hackney’s current mayor and the Learning Trust—the agency that now runs Hackney schools—some real hard work has been done. There has been a political focus on providing a framework and support in respect of buildings and resources so that teachers and our excellent head teachers can do their jobs properly. The approach in Hackney has been, ““Let’s take what the Government have to offer and make it work for Hackney.”” I therefore commend the Hackney experience to the Minister. If we can fix things in Hackney, that can be a real model for what can be done elsewhere. Hackney schools really are schools plus. They work with children from some of the most challenging backgrounds, where alcohol and substance abuse are common. A lot of those children need child protection, but they intermingle with children who are perhaps from more stable backgrounds. However, our schools provide stability, and it is often the only stability that some of those children have in their chaotic lives. Hackney schools have embraced extended schools fully. I visited a number of schools in my constituency during September, all of which offer breakfast clubs and after-school activities, and several of the secondary schools provide weekend and evening activities too. Indeed, the head teacher of the Hackney Free and Parochial Church of England secondary school said that she wants a cleaning contract in the school to run from 10 pm to 6 am, because that is the only time of the day, week, or year that the school is not being used, save for a week or two’s closure in the summer. I commend that model to other areas. There is also a great deal of adult learning in English, information and communications technology and general literacy in our schools. They are opened up for the parents, who hit the system at the point where their child gets to primary or secondary school, and they are welcomed into Hackney schools. Family learning is a particularly important area for Hackney schools, and I want to give a couple of examples in that regard. Burbage primary school’s head teacher, Karen Glenister, who is a visionary woman, has been working with parents to encourage them to learn about how to be better parents. She talks about one experience involving a parent who was called in a number of times because his son was being a little difficult. Originally he would say, ““How dare you call me in? My son is an angel who never misbehaves, and you are picking on him.”” Gradually, she won him round and got him to acknowledge that there were some difficulties, although not insoluble ones, with his son’s behaviour. She hooked him in to a parent support scheme, and at the end of the year, he turned up to the school smartly dressed in a suit and with a speech prepared. He asked whether he could make it as he was awarded his certificate for his adult learning experience. He spoke with great emotion about how his family life and his life as a father was so much better because of the support he had received through the primary school. That picks up on points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North and the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) that reading recovery, although important, needs to be part of a wider whole and that parental support is also crucial. Daubeney primary school in Homerton has just received a large sum of money over three years to ensure that it can provide family learning support of a similar nature. Those are just two examples, but all schools in Hackney are doing something. If the Minister would like to know more about this, I commend that he visit Hackney to see things for himself. Thanks to Government investment, new buildings and new schools are being built in Hackney. Three new city academies have either been built or are on the way. Mossbourne community academy, our first one, received an outstanding Ofsted report just a couple of weeks ago. Great progress has been made, which has translated into results. This year, for the first time in many years, more than 50 per cent. of pupils in Hackney schools gained five or more A* to C-grade GCSEs—the actual figure was 51 per cent, which represents an increase of 4 per cent. from last year. Results in Hackney are improving three times faster than those in the rest of England. Unfortunately, a Channel 4 programme recently decided to name Hackney as the worst place in Britain to live, but these results show that such programmes are living in the past. Perhaps people should visit Hackney and its schools to see how Hackney is definitely not the worst; I think it is one of the best places in Britain. We have also benefited from other national schemes such as Book Start, which runs from birth, Sure Start for all under-fives and the effect of Sure Start on four and five-year-olds in respect of support when they reach primary school. That is why reading recovery is important. Hackney reading recovery schemes are funded in a variety of ways in the borough: the neighbourhood renewal fund gives money to schemes in 10 schools; the Shoreditch trust is a new deal for communities partnership that funds six schools in the Shoreditch area; and ““Every child a reader””, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North, is a partnership between the Department for Education and Skills, charitable trusts and the business sector, including, in particular, the KPMG Foundation, that funds five schools. That scheme is hosting an event in Parliament next week, and I hope that the Minister will be able to go along to hear more about this. Four schools are self-funding; the value of reading recovery is such that they found the resources to provide this invaluable service. My hon. Friend went into great detail about the research in this area, so I shall not repeat all that. The cost of reading recovery is about £2,500 a child. That provides the one-to-one tuition that is needed for half an hour a day over three to four months. As he said, it is peanuts when we consider the consequences of not tackling the issue and the impact on society of children who leave school with lower than average levels of literacy. The reading recovery programme is well established and is working well in Hackney, which was one of the first 11 areas in the country to use it. Currently, there are 43 trained reading recovery teachers, who work in 25 schools. Some 20 of those schools have one full-time reading recovery teacher per form entry. In Hackney, reading recovery is an important part of the work to tackle poverty and improve the life chances of children. The children in that scheme are some of the most in need. Two out of three children on the programme in Hackney are entitled to free school meals, and 13 per cent. are either looked-after children or are from asylum-seeking and refugee families. As we know from other research, children from families where the main impediment to learning relates to English language quickly catch up and go on to contribute a great deal if they receive the right support at an early stage. Many children in Hackney schools are learning English as a second language, and reading recovery has an important role in improving attainment; some 65 per cent.—well over half—have English as an additional language, and 25 per cent are Turkish or Kurdish speaking. I have discussed some of the issues for Turkish and Kurdish speakers in my constituency with the DFES. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to parents at Alevi, which is a large Turkish and Kurdish organisation, about the challenges that face their children. They are concerned that their children are slipping behind in schools. It is not a question of their intelligence but of the barriers that are created, partly through language. I also gave those parents a challenge. I said that their children will not do so well unless they speak English, or even Turkish, at home. Many Hackney schools provide Turkish literacy lessons for parents, so that they learn to improve their speaking with their children in their mother tongue. That provides an enormous benefit. Recently, I spoke to another hon. Member who represents a London constituency, who told me that they are doing some early research—so I shall not name the constituency at this point—that seems to indicate that children who attend additional Saturday school English and Turkish classes then do better at GCSE level. We are collating that research, and I flag this up to the Minister because there is a London-wide issue about how our Turkish and Kurdish children are achieving. I want the slower rate of progress to change so that their achievement is on a par with that of other ethnic groups that have English as a second language. There have been major successes in the achievement of black boys. I give credit to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), who represents my neighbouring constituency and who pioneered the issue before it was flavour of the month. She put it on the educational map. We need to do similar things with the education of Turkish and Kurdish pupils, and she, and others in Hackney and across London, are trying to do that. I want to flag that up to the Minister because he will be hearing more about it from a number of us over the coming months. I return to the issue of reading recovery. Reading recovery teachers train and support teaching assistants in the talking partners programme, which focuses on important oral language skills for children: developing the speaking and listening skills that underpin literacy. As other hon. Members have said, many children do not get that development at home. It is important to ensure that investment is made in language development in schools. My hon. Friend referred to the perfect world that we may one day been in, where parents have all the parental support that some get through Hackney schools and hopefully others get through schools in his constituency. Parents do not all get that now, so we must ensure that we provide it in schools alongside the important parental learning. It is important that the programme is not just one in Hackney or Nottingham: it must be nationwide. In Hackney and in London generally, there is a high turnover in population. Children often do not stay in the same school. It is important that such children do not lose out just because they have changed school, particularly where their parents do not understand or value what the reading recovery programme gives them. It is unjust that a child on such a scheme can lose the support overnight by moving school; it does not travel with them and it is not universal. Some 6 to 7 per cent. of children, rising to 10 per cent. among boys, leave primary schools without the most basic reading and writing skills. That represents about 40,000 children a year in England. I am sure that the Minister takes this seriously. The reading recover scheme is one of the programmes that provides excellent results. Some 83 per cent. of children in Hackney who take part in it catch up completely with their classmates, and often overtake them, after only 12 to 20 weeks of daily teaching. The £2,500 is a small price to pay for that rapid, tangible progress. I know that the Government like to see tangible progress and like to point out how their investment is getting results. On that basis, I hope that the Minister was listening closely to those figures. Throughout the country and in Hackney, it is helping to give the best chance to the children who most need it. Numeracy recovery is also starting in some schools in Hackney and I shall be interested to see how that programme develops for slow learners in maths. Other issues are involved in how that is programmed in and it is not just a one-off hit, so a different approach may be needed but it is an exciting project. We do not want children to fall behind at that crucial early stage in their lives and to be labelled a substandard reader, because that will impact on them for the rest of their lives. My hon. Friend referred to some of the figures on people in prison and youth custody who cannot read well. Of those in youth custody, 25 per cent. had a reading age of below seven. That is disgusting in our modern world and we must tackle the problem. It will take years to get the solution through the system, but if we deal with reading recovery now we will get there. My direct plea to the Minister is that we need continuity of funding, not one-off schemes. We need a national programme and to follow Hackney’s example of the excellent parent and learning family support that is provided through our schools. In short, we need Sure Start not just for under-fives, but at five and for parents who did not have that start in life.