The pitfalls of the Accelerated Reader programme

To my enormous pride, my six-year-old daughter is an excellent reader. In Reception, she raced through the colour-coded chart of Biff & Chip books with ease and wound up bored. So bored that she took to jumping off trees with increasing exuberance each playtime. She needed to be stretched, the school decided, with only a hint of exasperation.

Stretch her we did. That summer, we read T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats aloud, laughing at the names Bombalurina and Macavity. We read Eleanor Farjeon’s Kings and Queens and wondered at how we were all Elizabethans. We read The Diary of Anne Frank and thought about annexes. We read Judith Kerr’s magisterial When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and she packed her own evacuee suitcase.

Back at school, the books given to her to read were, inevitably, dull.