50 books a year challenge

Michael Gove MP, who as you might know looks after education for England and Wales, has caused a frisson in the literary community - children's writers in particular - over his comment that every eleven year old should be aiming at reading 50 books a year.

You'd think authors would be all for such a thing. More reading surely means more sales. But Gove has been subject to a volley of criticism.

No surprise really. The Coalition's budget cuts have led to swingeing library closures as councils have cut the one thing no one truly considers essential but which every one would like to see continue. Anthony Browne, the children's laureate, spoke about this on radio, pointing out that if the government hadn't been cutting libraries perhaps children would get the chance to read more.

Put the libraries debate to one side and strangely my sympathies this time are with Gove. His point is roughly this: kids in the UK aren't reading enough and we are setting the bar too low in education and not encouraging them to read more. More books under your belt means better spelling, grammar and what do you call it? Vocabulary. Reading is good.

As it is, GCSE candidates are getting by on a couple of novels a year (and one of them is Of Mice And Men, he complains). In America, in some well motivated schools, teachers daringly set challenges: who can read all the Harry Potters first? First to Fifty, etc. Why not do the same here?

The comments from several children's writers to the effect that it's the quality of the reading experience that counts, not the number, is hooey. Volume matters too - it's a way of keeping count. Plus information has a habit of, well, sort of piling up. It's useful, like having an iPhone inside your skull.

Yes folks, reading expands the brain and raises your aspirations. If a person reads just one book a year and gets plenty out of it great. But what good is it if he or she spends the rest of the year on Facebook or murdering zombies on Playstation? By the time he gets round to picking up another book his brain will be back to mush.

Gove made his comments as part of a campaign to get people onside for his plan of independently run state schools. Scotland is excluded from this, of course. We have The Finest Education System.... yada yada yada. But the truth is, Scotland's middle classes have long opted out of the state sector: nowhere has better value independent day schools than Glasgow and Edinburgh (half what you'd spend in London). Their stellar results and league tables speak for themselves. As to the others, I doubt if Scots kids are reading any more than their southern neighbours. And most of our libraries are staying open.

Jamie's Nightmare School

Love Jamie. He's great. Have (most of) his books. The cheat's banoffee pie is a current favourite, as is the grilled salmon. Do I have a problem with the fact he is now trying to 'save education'. Not really. He's a TV person, fundamentally. Jamie's Dream School isn't a real school, it's a TV show about education. And really, if he isn't going to make a mainstream TV hit out of the problems faced in schools every day, who is?

After the first episode I felt a little cheated. TV's own reliance on TV people hurt the format and destroyed any chance that the experiment, if that is what it was, could actually be valuable in itself. Rolf Harris, lovely man, is not a trained educator. Nor is Simon Callow nor David Starkey.

Ah, yes, Starkey. He was completely in the wrong to call that large boned, genetically challenged boy 'fat'. Of course he was. But what I found interesting was the headmaster's response to that 'crisis'. (This is a made up school, isn't it, can't it just have its own made up rules and have it so everyone gets called fat?)

The headmaster watched a tape of the incident and established what we already knew - that Starkey had cast the first stone. (Starkey makes a living out of casting the first stone. Did you hear him on R4's Any Questions lately?) The headmaster then started wringing his hands and warned that a disciplinary process might be called for.

Of course, he was right. But was it just editing that caused us to have the impression that the headmaster wasn't at all bothered with the way the children had behaved in that class, either before or after 'fat' was uttered by a man with more qualifications than those children have sent text messages.

The phones were going. The chatter was constant. Girls were nipping out for a chat. The boys were rolling their eyes.

Starkey was like a rabbit in the headlights, utterly unable to cope with what was happening to him. He was being run over by a 20 teen truck. He is, as Jamie pointed out, a man who expects to be listened to. He'd brought with him £30 million's worth of ancient Britain bling, but the kids couldn't have been less impressed. They hardly gave it a glance.

Actually, I felt sorry for him. But as he himself pointed out, it's the kids who are really being harmed. Their lack of discipline has left them incapable of learning.

Apparently the kids do go on a positive journey in this programme. Many of them get the wake up call needed and look set to rejoin the education process (they were all chosen because, like 50 per cent of their contemporaries they failed to gain the five basic gcses needed to go on to A level).

But will the programme influence government, decision makers or teachers - including those like the TV head who seem more interested in teacher behaviour than that of the kids? Don't bet on it.