Alan Gibbons’ Blog

In a lazy moment I was surfing the Internet, egotistically having a look at my own entries when I discovered an old speech. I am pleased to say I wouldn’t alter a word and, in essence, it is very close to the submissions I have been putting to various bodies as I press the platform of the Campaign for the Book. I present it here unedited.

Key Note Speech delivered by Alan Gibbons at Youth Libraries Group Conference 17^th-19^th Sept 2004

“What is reading for?”

I can still remember the moment I fell in love with reading. I was sitting in my primary school, autumn sunlight on my face, dust motes spiralling lazily in the tawny light, listening to the teacher reading the opening chapter of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s novel did exactly what a seminal read should do: it took me to another place. I was with Lucy walking through the back of that wardrobe into the snowy land of Narnia. Later in the evening, when my Mum came looking for me to tell me tea was ready, where did she find me? Pretty obvious really, I was curled up in my parents’ wardrobe, racing through the story, hoping against hope I too would be admitted into Lewis’ fantasy realm. Physically, I never was. But in a sense that is more than metaphorical, I crossed that threshold at the tender age of eight.

After that, I always had my nose in a book. Some of the landmarks I can still make out poking through the mists of memory. I loved Emil and the Detectives, Treasure Island, Children of the New Forest, Coral Island, Bows Against the Barons, Kidnapped. I lapped up H.Rider Haggard and W.E.Johns. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, I found Alice in Wonderland disturbing. My parents, examples of Tony Blair’s hard-working people, invested in all the Bobbsey Twins novels, Look and Learn magazine and the ubiquitous I-Spy books. I relived the Battle of Thermopylae, froze on my way back from the Pole with Scott and Oats and dreamed of spotting a Golden Oreal perched on a branch somewhere. I became a reader, a lover of words, and words are the tools with which I earn my living today.

My route to literacy and literature came about like this. It began with talk, lots and lots of it, anecdotes, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, memories, shaggy dog stories. My infant mind buzzed with the stuff. Intrigued by the rhythms and cadences of language, I tried to emulate the best of what I heard. In other words, good quality listening led to a determination to produce good quality speaking. Built on those solid foundations, I set out to construct a castle of words. Reading was the cornerstone of that edifice, its walls, its vaults, its arching roof. The final link in the chain was writing. The whole thing was like a plastic, organic, developing machine. The cog of listening turned the cog of speaking. That cog subsequently turned the third cog, reading. Finally, the fourth cog, writing, started, however slowly, to move.

My reading became more challenging. When I was in my early to mid teens my Dad, along with lots of other men, brought home from work a battered copy of a ‘dangerous’ book. It was Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.Lawrence, passed round more because of its notoriety than an interest in literary quality. It was dog-eared and duly fell open at the key pages where Connie’s pendulous breasts swung like bells. That was one simile the adolescent Alan Gibbons committed eagerly to memory! My Dad didn’t know I was sneaking into my parents’ bedroom to read the novel of course. I had to read it in furtive episodes when they went to the pub on a Sunday evening. When I discovered Lawrence’s poem Piano in a school anthology I was keen to read it. I was transfixed. One phrase in particular sticks in my mind: ‘the insidious mastery of song.’ The rest of my life has been devoted to its pursuit.

My reason for regaling my readers with this story in such detail is, I hope, clear. It is the tale of how I became literate. Pleasure, enjoyment, inspiration, imitation and love all had their part to play. One element doesn’t figure: usefulness, utilitarianism. I didn’t devour this diet of books and poems because they would do me good or ‘improve’ me. I didn’t do it because it would get me a ‘good job.’ I didn’t do it to get some reward. I did it because I wanted to.

This brings me to the central argument of my article. In recent years utilitarianism has come to dominate any discussion of education. Learning has to be for something. There has to be, in the lexicon of modern education, an objective. By extension, so does reading.

Didacticism however is the death of English teaching. Self-expression, because that is what literature is all about, is an end in itself. It is what we human beings are all about.

I was recently in a classroom of fourteen year olds. On the teacher’s desk there was a comprehension. The first question went something like this: “What does Juliet mean when she says: ‘Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’”

I bet that took a lot of thought. Picture Will Shakespeare transported to the future and seeing this crass abuse of his work. The Bard’s baldness would certainly have been accelerated! Children forced to do such pointless tasks become sullen and unresponsive and who can blame them?

Imagine if we learned to walk or talk according to some government strategy. We might start with Level One, crawling, before going on to Level Two, tottering. Level Three might involve protracted furniture gripping before we managed Level Four, independent staggering. Young children don’t go through discrete, rigidly defined stages like this. They try to do the whole thing, to emulate the adults they see walking successfully. They make mistakes, they combine developmental stages, they play, they go forward and back. In other words they reach for the stars and then are forced by their immaturity to almost randomly explore the stepping stones on the way to the sky.

How does the teaching of English in our schools measure up to the ambitious aim of making all our children literate?

It currently consists of three main elements: the testing regime, the inspection service Ofsted and the National Literacy Strategy. Let’s start with testing and, until mid-adolescence, that essentially means SATs. The establishment of this form of standard testing at seven, eleven and fourteen has produced a neurotic atmosphere of permanent panic and cramming in our schools. For years swimming, silent reading and browsing, the creative arts and other ‘fripperies’ (yes, a word I heard from a Head teacher a couple of years ago) have been routinely abandoned in the pursuit of higher test scores.

There is one big problem. SATs don’t work. Yes, in the early years, constant teaching to the test pushed up scores. But if you concentrate exclusively on test technique only the most vacuous airhead could fail to add a few percentage points. Recent research by Professor Peter Tymms of Durham University suggests that rising test scores mean little. Pupils who registered impressive gains in Key Stage Two assessments in 1999 have failed to record corresponding improvements at GCSE five years later. Government ministers argue that the drill and test revolution has yet to change the culture of secondary schools sufficiently. A more plausible explanation is that the Key Stage Two improvements were illusory, the product almost exclusively of better teaching to the test.

The inspection regime has been even more ludicrous and damaging. Initially we had the comical, macho posturing of Chris Woodhead, by all accounts before his re-branding as a pedagogic hard man a trendy and rather unimpressive classroom teacher himself.

Woodhead was encouraged to establish a brutal, arbitrary and punitive approach to inspection. Many teachers were demonised and ridiculed. None were supported or encouraged. Some very good teachers were driven out of the profession, others became unwell, still others played the game to survive then lapsed into resigned cynicism. The effect on the culture of the classroom was catastrophic. Teaching was encouraged to become uniform, obedient and conformist. Staff looked over their shoulder to see ‘if they were doing it right.’ They fell into teaching by numbers. Not surprisingly, most now say that the fun went out of teaching in this period, that children often became reluctant and switched off and that any semblance of creativity withered as dismally as Mr Woodhead’s limp and unconvincing arguments.

Finally, there is the National Literacy Strategy. Now here I must declare an interest. I am a critical friend of the NLS. Or is it a friendly critic? In many areas of the country I work with wonderful, creative NLS advisors trying to create a synthesis out of these elements: reading for pleasure, inspirational teaching, love of the subject and affection for the young learners. The NLS however was marked for a long time by the conditions of its birth. Its dysfunctional family consisted of government edicts, Ofsted, the testing regime and absurd media expectations. Not surprisingly, there were excesses.

Much of the framework was staggeringly over-prescriptive and weighted far too heavily in the direction of technical language and decontextualised approaches to syntax, grammar and spelling. Reading for pleasure, as Philip Pullman has pointed out, barely figures in the documentation. The result, in many areas I was meeting eleven year olds who could explain an ellipsis but had never read a book from cover to cover! Then there was that daft clock. You started with the pink zone introducing the children to a ‘text.’ Not a book you understand but a text. I actually had a class greet me proudly with the information that there were 25 adjectives in the first chapter of one of my novels. Who cares? The next lesson segment you might call the blue zone. Here you had to investigate grammar, syntax and phonics. After that you entered the black zone where the child actually had to do something. Then, just when the whole prescriptive nonsense had probably knocked the stuffing out of children and teacher alike, you were ready for the grey zone, or plenary.

Direction is good. Unlocking meaning through syntax and grammar is essential. But harping on about features of text, about punctuation and subordinate clauses to the exclusion of fun or creativity is flat, dull, stale and unprofitable. After all the initiatives, all the in-service training, the mind-numbing edicts and exhortations from on high, huge challenges exist. The findings of a National Literacy Strategy survey in Surrey are evidence of this. 30% of pupils who attained level 3 at Year Six didn’t progress at all between KS2 and KS3, 2003. Of pupils who attained level 4 at Year 6 19%, almost a fifth, were still at level 4 three years later.

Genuine, sustained progress in English will not come about because we test kids to distraction, track them, cram them and drill them. It will come about by working to achieve a substantial increase in the proportion of youngsters who read for pleasure. This would start with talk. I have been in junior schools where teachers no longer read a novel to their class at the end of the afternoon. There isn’t time in a crowded curriculum, I am told. Hogwash! Make time. For most of us, the experience of listening to a well-loved story is one of the enduring memories of childhood. Have poetry sessions. Don’t take them apart, don’t comprehend them, don’t dissect them. Read them - OUT LOUD - in a funny voice, wearing a funny face! Through immersion in literature young people absorb the templates and structures of language. Their minds open to the possibilities of self-expression. Because of social deprivation and poverty, family breakdown, the pace of modern life and many other factors many children suffer an oralcy deficit. Children have to be exposed to good quality spoken language and that means a poem, an anecdote, a riddle, a joke, a story. Schools should ooze with literacy. Remember, this kind of qualitative shift would be the product not of external pressure but internal motivation.

The key to future progress is achieving the balance between instruction and enjoyment, of prescription and creativity, giving pupils the tools to read and write well without removing the freedom to express themselves. Recent research quoted in the Times Educational Supplement should give the utilitarians pause for thought. The evidence is that formal teaching of syntax has little effect. Demonstrating syntax in context does. What does that mean? Children who read and write for pleasure learn how to employ the rules of English usage effectively. It is a conclusion which will surprise few teachers. Surely it is self-evident that children’s language develops best in the context of fast-paced, lively, humorous teaching infused with intellectual rigour by confident teachers easy with their subject. So why has this been anathema to a succession of education ministers, particularly since the Callaghan speech in 1976?

Listen to some voices raised in support of a literature strategy:

‘We now expect children to analyse books and poems before they’ve learned to enjoy them.’ Bernard Ashley.

‘We are creating a generation of children who might be able to make the right noises when they see print, but who hate reading and feel nothing but hostility for literature.’ Philip Pullman.

So what are the key elements of a progressive platform for literacy? I would begin with reading development. This would recognize the centrality of a well-funded library in which a chartered librarian would tailor children’s reading to their interests. The English staff and the librarian would organise book weeks and author visits. They would encourage silent reading, browsing and book ownership. There would be a school bookshop. Writing activities in the classroom would be intimately linked to the encouragement of reading for pleasure outside it. Primary schools in clusters would benefit from the experience of the High School librarian. All this can be an uphill struggle if the Senior Management Team is unsympathetic. One excellent librarian got promotion within the local authority and was horrified to discover that her post had not been filled and that her treasured library would be left in the hands of a harassed amateur. I have met other librarians whose temple of books has been closed to make way for an IT suite! Computers are fine but you can’t use them unless you have absorbed the skills of browsing, selection and research. Yes, that means reading, and it is books that teach you to read.

Picture the reading school. Classrooms would feature author biographies on the wall. There would be a book of the week stand in every classroom. Children would report on their favourite books. In short, the entire school would become literate. Visitors would be met with anthologies of students’ work. Children’s writing would dominate displays.

Where, you ask, would teachers find the time to produce this reader-friendly environment? For starters we could do away with SATs and league tables and replace them with moderated teacher assessment. We would certainly save millions of pounds of tax payers’ money. You never know, we might even spend some of it on books. Children’s writing could be levelled using a portfolio of their work. Ofsted could be replaced by a supportive and intellectually rigorous inspection service. How would teachers know they are intellectually rigorous? Simple, inspectors would teach a demonstration lesson at the start of the inspection week to prove their worth. Advisors would be re-deployed to team-teach with the staff they advise rather than sitting in an office tracking meaningless results.

Teacher training could be remodelled. Out would go the managerial style which prizes power point presentations, statistics and an encyclopaedic teaching file over humour, pace and knowledge of your subject. Children’s literature would become a central module in college. Schemes like Writing Together would be extended bringing together teachers, librarians, poets and authors in a campaign to get young people reading and writing.

At its best literature does far more than entertain. It contributes to our spiritual and moral growth. It encourages empathy. You learn to see through another person’s eyes, walk in their shoes, feel the drumbeat of their heart. To paraphrase Bill Shankly, some people say reading is a matter of life and death. It is far more important than that.

Alan Gibbons

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