THE Children’s Laureate accused primary school teachers yesterday of failing their pupils by using literacy hours to do their marking rather than encourage reading.
As a result, many children were not given the inspiration or encouragement to learn to love books, Michael Morpurgo, a former teacher, told The Times.
Mr Morpurgo, who is one of Britain’s most successful writers of young fiction, said:
“Although there are many wonderful teachers who love books, there are equally as many for whom books are simply ‘a tool for literacy hour’. That can put children off extremely easily.”
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Writers who visit schools up and down the country repeatedly encountered teachers who regarded a reading session as a chance to do their marking, he said, noting the negative message that that sent to the children.
“In doing that, the teacher is showing children that ‘this is not interesting’.
“Time and time again, there are instances of a writer going into a school and the teacher even doesn’t come, leaving it instead to a teaching assistant. This shouldn’t happen even once. There are far too many teachers teaching our young children who don’t love books.”
The Children’s Laureate is a roving ambassador for books, a post awarded every two years to a British writer or illustrator to celebrate outstanding achievement in his or her field.Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, lobbied the Culture Department to begin the initiative and was patron of the award until his death in 1998.
The illustrator Quentin Blake was the first Children’s Laureate, in 1999, followed by the author Anne Fine, whose Madame Doubtfire inspired the Robin Williams film Mrs Doubtfire.
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Until he was 30, Mr Morpurgo whose books, even those aimed at six-year-olds, deal with birth and death, conflict, families and relationships, taught in schools.
Telling stories to pupils inspired him to write. He has since published 100 books in 25 languages and has won several literary awards, including the Smarties Prize and Whitbread Children’s Book.
He was talking to The Times yesterday after adding another to the list, the Red House Children’s Book Award, known as the “children’s choice” because it is Britain’s only major children’s literary prize voted for entirely by children.
This year more than 25,000 readers under the age of 14 took part in judging it, picking Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful, about a boy soldier shot for perceived cowardice during the First World War.
In the past 30 years, through this award, children have been ahead of grown-ups in recognising writers such as Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling.
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Mr Morpurgo said that, despite the Harry Potter phenomenon, millions of children were not reading and that, with the distractions of television, the internet and mobile telephones, they were often “unwilling souls who don’t see the point of it”.
He added that, in an ideal world, reading should happen with a mother and a father sitting on a child’s bed. “We know that doesn’t always happen. Too often, children are being told, ‘Go and watch telly and shut up’.”
He is calling for compulsory training on children’s literature to be introduced for trainee teachers. “Most teacher-training colleges don’t have a course for literature. What you have is yesterday’s children becoming today’s teachers. Many do not have a love of reading, but these are people responsible for teaching literacy to our children.
“If teachers do not love books, a literacy class simply becomes ‘a lesson’ and a chore. All these teachers are coming into our schools to teach eight to ten-year-olds and they’ve not read Anne Fine or Philip Pullman. These are wonderful writers but if you don’t love them yourself, how on earth can you convey a love of reading? It just becomes a detached dry subject that some academic children can access.”
In drawing up a Top Ten list of books that teachers should be using to inspire children, he picked relatively recent titles, although he would then entice them with classics of children’s literature such as the Just So stories of Rudyard Kipling and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
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He said: “The important thing in reading a book to a child is that it succeeds. My favourite book is Treasure Island, but the language is from another time. Some children might find that difficult to access. If you want to be really sure, then these ten would get there quicker.”
Once inspired, children can then move on to the classics, he said before joining a group of 150 children who had assembled to hear him read in the Highland village of Ullapool.
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