500 writers declare war on illiteracy

The Daily Mail reports that more than 500 authors yesterday called on Gordon Brown to tackle illiteracy among children. Nick Hornby, Ian Rankin, Andrew Motion and Jackie Collins were among best-selling writers to sign a letter expressing "deep concern" over pupils' reading standards. They highlighted figures showing that one in five children fails to achieve basic reading standards at primary school.

The letter handed in to Number Ten yesterday calls for children to be taught to read at school for an hour a day until they have mastered the skill. The coalition of 545 authors also includes No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency author Alexander McCall Smith, Anthony Horowitz, creator of the Alex Rider teenage spy novels, Tracy Chevalier, who wrote Girl With A Pearl Earring, and Sophie Dahl, Roald Dahl's granddaughter, whose first novel is Playing With The Grown-Ups.
The letter was presented to Downing Street by Kate Mosse, the biggest-selling author of 2006, Sophie Kinsella, writer of the Shopaholic series, Tony Parsons, author of Man And Boy, and so-called queen of the Aga Saga, Joanna Trollope. They were joined by Amanda Ross, the executive producer of The Richard And Judy Show, who is credited with introducing the couple's successful book club.

The authors said they were "deeply concerned" about levels of literacy and called for a push to tackle the problem. It follows a damning world league table which exposed falling literacy standards among England's ten-year-olds. In five years, English schools fell from third to 19th in an international table of reading achievement.

The back-to-basics synthetic phonics method of teaching reading was only made law in English schools last year but there are reports of some teachers still clinging to discredited methods. The authors' plea follows a documentary filmed at Monteagle Primary School in Dagenham, East London, and screened on Channel 4 earlier this year. An intensive synthetics programme managed to double the number of children who were reaching reading standards expected of their age. Miss Ross said: "Total literacy in our schools is achievable. Monteagle went a long way to proving that. "There are towns in India that have achieved 100 per cent literacy - we shouldn't settle for less."

A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said: "The literacy hour has ensured that more than 100,000 children are now making the grade than was the case in 1997."