Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to improve literacy levels among primary school children.

The Government is committed to continuing to raise literacy standards, including for those children from disadvantaged backgrounds. English is fundamental to education and provides the knowledge pupils need to communicate with others, both in school and in the wider world, providing pupils the opportunity to develop their spoken language, reading and writing.

The National Curriculum has been designed to make sure that all children leave primary school fully literate and ready to progress at secondary school. There is a renewed focus on the requirement for pupils to be taught to read through systematic synthetic phonics and applying phonic knowledge to word reading. By ensuring high quality phonics teaching, the Government wants to improve literacy levels to give all children a solid base upon which to build as they progress through school and help children to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information.

The curriculum places a greater focus on reading and requires pupils to study a range of books, poems and plays to encourage the development of a lifelong love of literature. Within the framework of the National Curriculum, schools make their own choices on the specific programmes or resources they use. The curriculum for English increases the level of challenge from an early age with greater emphasis on grammar and vocabulary development, and in 2013 the Department introduced a new test of pupils’ knowledge in this area to be taken by Year 6 pupils. Ofsted’s inspection framework now puts much more focus on how well schools are teaching their pupils to read, with inspectors listening to children reading aloud, watching phonics classes, and checking how schools help weaker readers to improve. The Ofsted inspection framework is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/education-inspection-framework.

England achieved its highest ever score in reading in 2016, moving from joint 10th to joint 8th in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study rankings. This improvement is largely attributable to increases in the average performance of lower performing pupils. This follows a greater focus on reading in the primary curriculum, and a particular focus on phonics.

In 2018, the Department launched a £26.3 million English Hubs Programme dedicated to improving the teaching of reading, with a focus on supporting children making the slowest progress in reading, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds. The 34 English Hubs in the programme are primary schools which are outstanding at teaching early reading. The Department has since invested a further £17 million in this school to school improvement programme, which focusses on systematic synthetic phonics, early language, and reading for pleasure. Since its launch, the English Hubs Programme has provided appropriate and targeted support to several thousands of schools across England. In the 2020/21 academic year the programme is providing intensive support to over 875 partner schools.

The proportion of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in the phonics screening check has gone from 58% in 2012, when the check was introduced, to 82% in 2019. For disadvantaged pupils, this has gone from 45% to 71%.