Run away from the inside of a book.

There's not a lot of call for books among our 15 year-olds in Wales, it seems. Almost half of them will tell you that they only read if they have to, and nearly two thirds never borrow library books to read for pleasure.

The source of these figures is the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report, which has just informed us that Wales is below all of the other countries in the UK as far as our teenagers' performance in reading is concerned.

 The response from the Welsh Assembly government has been predictable and hands, and necks, are being wrung.

The previous PISA report took place in 2006 and, although Wales did slightly better then, it certainly did not shine. So what has changed in four years that might lead us to expect that we ought to have improved? The answer, at least for the educational experience that our current sixteen year-olds will have received, is, "Not much yet."

Since 2006, the lion's share of Welsh government support and training has gone to the exciting, but still developing, Foundation Phase (the education of 3 - 7 year-olds), while in Key Stages 2 and 3 (8 to 14 year-olds) a fundamental re-structuring of the curriculum and its assessment is taking place with far fewer resources. The simple truth, anyway, is that it's too early yet for any of these developments to have had a positive impact on the education of pupils who may have been included in the 2009 PISA assessments.

And so, what about PISA 2012? The pupils who will take part are already 13 years old, still too old to have experienced substantially the changes that are being wrought around them in the education system in Wales, and so perhaps it isn't likely that we will see results that are tremendously different from those we've seen already. I suppose this is what is called an inconvenient truth.

 There is a more fundamental issue than mere curriculum-design to be addressed here, however. The love of reading, and its corresponding facility to understand and to engage with the written word, is not something that is simply the responsibility of schools to ignite. A learner's whole community, and especially parents and grandparents, must play their part.  

Through others, we become ourselves

said Lev Vygotsky .

We must look to ways in which we should support, and expect, every child's parents or carers to acknowledge that they are its first teachers, not the school. This is not an easy responsibility to bear, nor would it be popular with some.
And so it is more likely that what will take place is more adjustment to the curriculum, with an attendant "searchlight on literacy" .

But we have tried that before and, as Michael Rosen, erstwhile Children's Laureate, observed,

The government has allowed a situation to develop where the word "reading" has come to mean something narrow and functional, no more than evidence that a child can read. This is an abdication of what education is about.

Is there are an alternative?

Well, he also says

I have always thought that teachers can think. In the particular segment of education where I mostly work, with literature and language for primary age children, I’ve come to the conclusion that literature and reading have become so reduced, dissected, cross-examined, abridged, chopped-up and tested that the most subversive, exciting and political thing to do now is to rush about creating moments in schools where the children will know for certain that all that they’ll have to do with a book, a poem, a story or a play is enjoy it.  No questions, no tests, no learning outcomes. 

Mind it!