School literacy hour fails to halt decline in reading skills

Reading standards in primary schools have fallen for the past two years despite the introduction of a daily literacy hour, inspectors said yesterday.

Four years into the strategy, an estimated 250,000 11-year-olds were leaving primary school each year unable to read, write or add up properly, a report by Ofsted, the Government's education standards watchdog, found.

David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, has ordered an immediate investigation by Ofsted into the teaching of reading in primary schools.

The drop in standards, of three percentage points, is an embarrassment to ministers, coming two months after they failed to reach the key education target of the Blair administration: raising 80 per cent of 11-year-olds to the required standard in English by 2002 and 75 per cent to the required standard in maths.

Mr Bell said the finding cast doubt on whether the Government would reach its next target of 85 per cent in both subjects by 2004.

In the first in-depth investigation into the Government's four-year-old literacy and numeracy strategies, Ofsted warned that poor leadership by headteachers in about 2,000 schools – one in 10 – was hampering efforts to improve standards. It said the Government had not given clear enough instructions on how to teach phonics – the system of learning sounds before mastering words.

A new "guided reading" scheme imported from Australia and New Zealand had been used without being tested in schools first, Ofsted said. In the literacy hour, teachers take aside groups of up to six pupils of a similar ability to hear them reading. The inspectors said these sessions were not planned properly in many schools.

Keith Lloyd, Ofsted's head of primary education, said the failure to pilot the scheme was the main reason for the fall in reading standards. "It would be foolish in the extreme not to have a look at the way we deliver this," he said.

The figures in yesterday's report show that the number of 11-year-olds reaching the required standard in reading had fallen from 86 per cent to 83 per cent among girls and from 80 per cent to 77 per cent among boys.

The report said that steps to tackle weaknesses in the teaching of numeracy had not been effective. In one in six schools, plenary sessions – a compulsory part of the strategy where the whole class is taught together – teaching was "weak".

Mr Bell said yesterday: "Whatever else I say today, I must emphasise the continuing and vital importance of these two strategies in driving up standards in primary schools."

"We are still talking about 250,000 children not achieving an acceptable level (in English and maths) at year six (11-year-olds). These youngsters are going to have a much more difficult start to their secondary education," he added.

Mr Bell urged ministers to carry out their own review of both strategies urgently, before Ofsted's inquiry was completed (in about 10 months' time).

He said that reading standards of 11-year-olds had fallen by three percentage points in the past two years. Overall, English results had remained static because writing standards had gone up by three percentage points.

This was largely a result of ministers' determination to improve the performance of boys.But girls were still 16 percentage points ahead of boys in writing at the age of 11, the report showed.

The Ofsted report was also scathing about the performance of headteachers in poorly-led schools. "Put simply,'' it said, "they do not do enough to make a difference to the quality of teaching in their schools.''