Schools 'must teach parents how to talk to children'

A "daily grunt" between parents and children has replaced the art of conversation in many homes, the head of the government agency responsible for improving literacy and numeracy standards said yesterday.

In response, every primary school should organise lessons for parents in how to play games with and talk to their children, Alan Wells, the director of the Basic Skills Agency, told the North of England education conference in Warrington, Cheshire.

He said children arriving at school at the age of four or five were "less articulate and less able to express themselves" than previous generations. "The general view of headteachers in the country is that the situation is getting worse," he added.

"I think it is partly the child sat in front of the TV and personal computer, partly the lack of time families spend having food together and partly the lack of conversation."

Monosyllabic replies from parents had replaced reasoned answers to children's questions. He said that in previous generations parental skills had been passed on by grandparents to parents. There were now many one-parent families "where grandparents aren't in existence and these skills are not passed on in the way they were in the past".

Mr Wells said the "death of conversation" was not only a problem in working-class homes – middle-class families were caught up with the pressures of work as well. Many parents did not read to their children nowadays.

He cited a scheme run by the skills agency in Wales, where schools had set up lessons for parents in their homes to teach them how to play games with their children and improve communication with them. "We need to establish family programmes as a right in every school rather than just a short-term programme," he said.

"Parents have an enormous influence on the attainment of their children and yet we do very little with them [the parents]."

Mr Wells cited national figures that showed 23 per cent of adults had difficulties with literacy or numeracy. A survey of 14 Western countries showed only Poland had a worse record.

He also said that too many children were taught in school buildings that "we should be ashamed of". Their classrooms were in a state "that would besmirch a Third World country".

He condemned the Government's obsession with target setting, likening it to "the equivalent of pig iron production in the Soviet Union".

The concentration on targets had led to primary schools being judged solely on their performance in the league tables that gave the results of national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds.Schools were rehearsing for the tests instead of educating their pupils. That, he said, was bad educational practice.

"I am a big advocate of trying to get the genie of league tables back in the bottle because I think there is a tyranny imposed by the tests," Mr Wells said. "The danger now is we are obsessed with testing, not teaching, and it is time we looked more critically at the assessment of children and the purpose of that assessment."

When national curriculum tests were introduced and sat in 1990, they were designed to build a picture of national education standards rather than judge individual schools. Mr Wells said he was not advocating scrapping the tests, merely returning them to their original purpose.