Transcript
SHAHED AHMED:
The important thing is not to put the kids off Reading for Pleasure. I think too often in schools, we've kind of really banged on about reading for inference and reading for comprehension and answering the SATs questions, when we lose sight of the fact that the most important thing is that we want to get children reading because they want to read.
They find it fulfilling. And then all of those other things-- comprehension, answering SATs questions-- will come, just because they're wanting to read, and they read a lot out of interest. So it's really, really important to get a balance of both the decoding of reading, reading instruction for comprehension, and Reading for Pleasure balanced, so that you're actually catering for all those things. Getting the children to read for pleasure in my opinion, it's more difficult than teaching them how to read, the mechanics of reading in the first place. Because children have got so many different distractions nowadays. There's the mobile phones, there are computers, there are games, there's television.
The minds in this digital age are pulled in several different directions. So I think first of all that's probably a really big challenge, it's first of all, how on Earth do we get children to want to pick up a text or a reading book and to read?
And the way that we can do that in school, is by having a really strong reading culture in the school. So the way that we've done this, is by making sure there's someone who can lead on that, someone who's really passionate about teaching themselves.
Who can work with teachers across the school, work with the other adults across the school, and help them, because the other challenge is obviously that a lot of our teachers nowadays themselves won't necessarily have all the up-to-date knowledge of children's literature.
What sort of books the children like now, not what we liked, sort of 20, 30 years ago, but what do children really like reading now. So that's another challenge. To get the teachers knowing what it is that children's interests are, and what sort of books they like to read.
And the other thing is money obviously, so you need some funding. You need some funding in order to be able to maybe pay someone to lead the Reading for Pleasure drive in the school, you need to have books both in classrooms, and the real importance of having the library that children can go to.
Obviously they can be going to the public library, but also the library you know, nice library place. It doesn't have to be a room, it could be in a corridor if you haven't got a room, but any space where you can have some really good attractive books facing out for children to be wanting to read, and for teachers to direct them to reading those books.
So it's a combination of kind of really getting that sort of consistent culture going and sustaining it, because you could have some sort of activities, flash in the pan for a few weeks and the whole school is buzzing, and everyone wants to be interested in Reading for Pleasure, come back to it six months later, a year later, and it's all dissipated. So the real challenge is driving this sort of culture, and then sustaining it year in, year out.