Reading For Pleasure

Last week of term but instead of relief and euphoria we had tears, nose-bleeds and raging frustration.  Way to go, Senior Leadership Team.

Good teachers want to inspire pupils, to instil in them a love for their subject.  Like most non-selective secondary schools, we have a number of pupils for whom reading is a struggle and a chore, who come from homes where there are no books and where the feeling is that reading is what you do at school.  Library lessons have therefore become something of an essential and a highlight for our Year 7s, an opportunity every so often to spend three-quarters of an hour immersed in a book they have chosen, something which really interests and engages them.  It emerged this week that this is Wrong.  Children should not be allowed to spend forty-five minutes reading.  They should be interrupted on a regular basis to be told what their objectives are, which level they're on and how much progress they've made since they plucked the book from the shelf.  Heaven forbid they should be left to concentrate, to be absorbed, to lose themselves in the written word.  What good would that do them?
Similarly, a bottom set Year 9 class has been reading Blood Brothers this term.  Two of the most challenged and challenging children in the class have been reading the main roles and taken them to their hearts.  I have never seen either child as engaged with or enthusiastic about anything as they are about playing Mickey and Mrs Johnstone and their acting has been tremendous.  But their teacher has been hauled over the coals because Blood Brothers was not listed in the Scheme of Work for that term. The children had already completed the Scheme of Work for that term.   Heaven forbid they should be allowed to enjoy anything.
Questions need to be asked about what we are teaching our children and why.