Lost the plot

Despite concessions by ministers, the extent of primary testing remains deeply controversial. Here, Philip Pullman, the prizewinning children's author, argues that we are creating a generation that 'hates reading and feels nothing but hostility for literature'
Philip Pullman
Pullman: Theatre feeds heart and soul

Literacy has both a public and a private pay-off. The first empowers us in society; the second enriches us as individuals and encourages us to think for ourselves... unless, of course, the latter is deliberately "educated" out of us for the convenience of those who'd really rather we didn't.

These are just a few of the concerns that have built up during the whole of my professional life as a teacher and a writer, but which I have become more urgently aware of in the recent past.

My first point concerns the mechanistic approach which seems to have taken hold of the way teachers talk about the process of writing. I'm thinking of the teacher who asked for my advice for her pupils who would shortly be confronted with a Sat, where the rubric for the writing test told them to spend exactly 15 minutes on planning their story, and 45 minutes on writing it. Proper writing just doesn't happen like that.

Nor does it always go through the process of planning, drafting, re-drafting, polishing and editing, which teachers are also required to put their unfortunate pupils through. Nor does every piece of work have to be completed. Some stories you aren't ready to write yet, so you put them away for six months or two years and come back to them when you're ready.

There are no rules. Anything that's any good has to be discovered in the process of writing it. Furthermore, there must be a willing suspension of certainty - Keats' negative capability, "the capability of remaining in doubts, hesitations and mysteries, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason". We cannot require everything to take place under the bright glare of discussion and checking and testing and consultation: some things require to be private and tentative.

Teaching at its best can give pupils the confidence to discover this mysterious state, and to begin to explore the things that can be discovered there. My experience with the pupils I've taught confirms this: the boy of 12 who was surly and uncommunicative, but who took a shine to me for some reason, and who responded when I encouraged him to write about the family's greyhounds. I told him to take his time, not to fret about it, but to talk to the page as if he were talking to me; and over half a term the most wonderful piece of writing emerged, full of knowledge and love and a vivid ability to convey it.

Then there were the two girls of 13 who wrote each other's biographies. Again, no pressure: they were best friends, and they wrote about how they went on holiday together, and how they chased boys, and how they argued and broke up; and then how the little brother of one of them died, and that drew them together again and now they couldn't imagine ever having hated each other as they once did so bitterly.

And those experiences of writing very vividly showed the children, firstly, that you could use language to say true things, important things; secondly, that what you wrote could affect other people, could move them, could make them think - "it affected me"; and thirdly, that you could work at your writing and learn to say things more clearly and strongly.

But none of that would have happened if I hadn't been able to give them the time to do it, and the freedom from the pressure of... Tests.

My second point concerns the brutal, unceasing emphasis on testing and marking. It leads to a superficial way of working and a very limited way of responding to it. I recently judged a short story competition run by a charity, and what dismayed me about the entries was they were all superficially bright and competent, correctly spelled and punctuated, and all absolutely lifeless.

They all bore the marks of having been drilled into the children: this is how you open a story; here you need some dialogue; you must have a punchy final paragraph. They would all have scored highly on a test. They were all empty, conventional and worthless.

The things you can test are not actually the most important things. When teachers are under pressure to get so many pupils to such-and-such a point, in order to meet an externally imposed target, they have to do things - for the sake of the school - that might not be things they'd do for the sake of the children.

My last point concerns reading. I recently read through the sections on reading in key stages 1 to 3 of the national literacy strategy, and I was very struck by something about the verbs. I wrote them all down. They included "reinforce", "predict", "check", "discuss", "identify", "categorise", "evaluate", "distinguish", "summarise", "infer", "analyse", "locate"... and so on: 71 different verbs, by my count, for the activities that come under the heading of "reading". And the word "enjoy" didn't appear once.

If we forget the true purpose of something, it becomes empty, a mere meaningless ritual. The purpose of what I do as a writer is to delight. I hope that the children who read me will do so because they enjoy it.

But this is what happens in schools now: a teacher wrote to me recently and complained that she'd been doing a book of mine called The Firework Maker's Daughter with her pupils, and she said she was finding the greatest difficulty preventing them from reading ahead to find out what was going to happen next. They had to stop, just when they got interested, and start predicting, or analysing, or evaluating, or something. They wanted to enjoy it, but she didn't feel she could let them.

I think she was paying me a compliment (see what exciting books you write), but her anxiety not to let a single verb in the literacy strategy go unticked, not a single box unfilled-in, was plain, and very dispiriting.

Finally, under reading, we really must learn not to press pupils for a response to everything. A child very seldom wants to talk about something that's made a deep impression: it's too personal, too sacred. But they soon learn what's expected, and they keep a set of stock answers that they have found will satisfy the teacher.

Nor should we demand a response at once. Sometimes the true effect of a story they read or hear in school will not emerge until many years later, and that should be sufficient.

To sum up: I am concerned that in a constant search for things to test, we're forgetting the true purpose, the true nature, of reading and writing; and in forcing these things to happen in a way that divorces them from pleasure, we are creating a generation of children who might be able to make the right noises when they see print, but who hate reading and feel nothing but hostility for literature.

· Meetings with the Minister: Five children's authors on the National Literacy Strategy, by Bernard Ashley, Anne Fine, Jamila Gavin, Chris Powling and Philip Pullman, is available for £4.95 from the National Centre for Language and Literacy, University of Reading, Bulmershe Court, Reading RG6 1HY; tel: 0118-378 8820; ncll.org.uk
· Bernard Ashley, Jamila Gavin and Chris Powling will be presenting their perspectives on the national literacy strategy at "Getting writing right", at the University of Reading on Saturday October 11. Contact details as above.

Crisis of creativity

To mark the start of Children's Book Week, five of the country's leading children's authors are publishing not books, but essays. Philip Pullman, Bernard Ashley, Anne Fine, Jamila Gavin and Chris Powling highlight their belief that the national literacy strategy and literacy hour are killing children's enjoyment of reading and writing.

Their collection of essays, Meetings with the Minister, sprang from a chance meeting in January with education secretary Charles Clarke at a Number 10 reception. Pullman and Ashley voiced their concerns. Their conversation - helped by Clarke's admiration of Pullman - produced two more meetings.

The writers say Clarke was generous with his time, and asked searching, relevant questions. Powling said the meeting was "informal, friendly and explorative". In May, Clarke announced a new style of assessment for seven-year-olds, combining testing and teacher appraisal, the handing back of targets to primary schools and the promise to give headteachers more freedom to ease creativity back into the curriculum.

Most teachers agree these to be positive steps, but there remains a groundswell against the "Three Ts" of testing, targets and tables. The National Union of Teachers is determined to ballot members on a boycott of Sats this autumn. And despite the reforms Clarke has announced, Pullman et al are emphatically not satisfied. They are ever more concerned with how the literacy hour and strategy have put teaching into a straitjacket - there are simply too many boxes for teachers to tick, and not enough time for actual education.

"A great deal of what is 'taught' about books technically can be deferred in favour of simply sharing and enjoying them," says Ashley in his essay. "Too much literacy teaching is directly related to the demands of the Sats at various stages - the curriculum devised in order to be examined."

Gavin says: "There is testing and testing. There is the fun of learning, competing against oneself, and trying to do better; and there is the testing to meet targets - with the pressure of a teacher knowing that if targets are met, more money is forthcoming." Though Gavin doesn't necessarily want Sats abolished - "there is no greater crime than to allow a child to leave school without those basic skills" - she warns "it is the league tables and testing which seem to have done the most incessant damage".

The authors argue that the use of extracts from "texts" to teach every thing from grammar to citizenship has made reading for pleasure a thing of the past. There is no longer time in the curriculum for reading aloud to the class, for silent reading,or time for extended writing - rather than planning, drafting, writing, and then re-writing, small chunks of text. As Powling puts it: "No child ever lost themselves in a text. It takes a book to do that."

Last month's Sats results showed no improvement in English at key stage 2, and no improvement in reading at key stage 1. "An analytical and vigorously tested drills-and-skills approach has come to predominate in primary classrooms at the expense of enjoy ment and the making of meaning," writes Powling. "There is now an increasing disparity between test scores and children's real life reading and writing. If unchecked, this disparity will eventually undermine the very advances which have been made."

Anne Fine notes a real drop in the standard of children's writing - not in grammar, construction or spelling, but in the untestable quality of creativity. She no longer accepts invitations to judge children's writing competitions. "The standards, even of the best, are generally so truly awful that I rarely think we should give a prize at all," she says. Like Pullman she condemns the current obsession with the "endless stale drafting and redrafting".

"There is no intrinsic reason why a fast first stab at a piece of writing shouldn't be the best it could be," Fine says. "And this is not maths. 'Showing your working' is not a virtue in English."

Ashley welcomes Clarke's intention to make school enjoyable for children, but adds: "It certainly isn't at present." "Let us change our targets," he says. "Instead of pulling arbitrary reading ages out of the air as markers of success... instead of running scared of middle England, let us make judgments on children's progress as evidenced by the nature of their own writing and the spirit of their reading, and let us try to measure the spirit as well as aspects of the mind. Doing so is not to deny standards and public examinations - we are not engaged in an argument for departing from all rigour; rather in an attempt to truly place school days among the happiest of our lives, with books a staple part of that happiness."
Mira Katbamna

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