‘How do we get children reading?’ the minister asked me, just a week after Michael Gove had got them reciting poetry, more or less by making it illegal for them not to. This was his number two, Nick Gibb, who had invited me to the Ministry of Education for a 40-minute chat. I’m not sure how impressed he was with my thoughts as I’ve heard nothing since, so it seems fair enough to share them with Spectator readers. Who knows? Maybe Mr Gibb is one of them.
Politicians have a way of paying lip service to the subject of illiteracy because it is one of those issues that couldn’t be simpler. We want children to read because it’s good for them… right? Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown presided over something called ‘The National Year of Reading’ and I dutifully turned up at Downing Street to be photographed with a smiling (or grimacing) PM and a crowd of kids. It did seem odd that, at the same time, one in three secondary schools were having their library budgets cut and only one in three schools had a full-time librarian, but we were all too polite to mention it. Only this week the Local Government Association predicted that, with all the cuts, public libraries could disappear completely by the end of the decade. According to the Public Libraries News website, 121 libraries were closed last year and 275 are under threat. Not a particularly healthy background for a discussion about literacy either.
My own experience has taught me that, for all the talk and occasional headlines, we still undervalue reading. I wasn’t even slightly surprised when, in March, the Riots Communities and Victims Panel suggested that illiteracy might have played a part in last year’s London riots.
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