During the pandemic, something strange happened to me. I lost the ability to read for pleasure. I have been a bookworm from a young age and have always considered myself to be a reader, but during the pandemic I just could not concentrate on any text that was not directly related to work.
Even now, several years on, I find I have little tolerance for any text that does not grab me immediately and my reading choices have become limited to genres I know I will find easy to understand and enjoy.
So, considering my own love/hate relationship with reading for pleasure, I am not too surprised by the recently published National Literacy Trust Annual Literacy Survey, which found that only 34.6 per cent of children between 8 and 18 enjoy reading in their free time.
This echoes the findings of the government’s recent Pirls (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) report, which highlighted a downward trend, with “fewer pupils in England report[ing] that they enjoy reading than in previous cycles”.
Nor am I surprised by the newly published Education Policy Institute study, suggesting that the phonics screening check (PSC) does not seem to have had a positive effect on children’s reading attainment over time.
More from Megan Dixon:
The PSC measures a single but important aspect of what is needed to be able to read. But it is by no means everything that a child needs to learn. However, a test with high accountability for the sector will inevitably become the curriculum itself. We learn to value what is tested and what we are measured against.
The loss of meaning
What often gets lost in these accountability structures is that reading is about understanding - it is about the meaning all the words in a text convey when they work together (and not the individual meaning of words in isolation).
Words on their own do not tell stories, share information, persuade or entertain. It is only when words are placed together that meaning is shared. Understanding the meaning that is shared by the words working together is far more complex than learning to decode words on their own.
What these publications seem to be suggesting is that there may be a missing piece or pieces in the way we are teaching reading. Perhaps we are underestimating the challenges our pupils face when they are learning to understand words working together.
If it is hard work to understand what is going on in a text, or our minds are elsewhere, then it stands to reason that reading may not be an easy and pleasurable choice at the end of a busy day. Sadly, I have learned this lesson myself.
Perhaps it is more important to see these reports as highlighting symptoms that result from wider challenges, rather than the challenge itself. They are the canaries in the coalmine and they are telling us that all is not well.
Megan Dixon is a doctoral student and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University
