There’s no shortage of odd, confusing, infuriating, ill-founded and contentious claims in education, and in the wider social chattersphere that sits around it, but surely there’s one that we can put to bed for good and for all: the idea that it is the job of parents to teach their children how to read – and by extension, that parents are to blame when children struggle in this endeavour.
There are many reasons why this cosy, middle-class-meme-cum-system-level-excuse-for-schools needs to be exploded and I’ll address as many as I can here.
First of all though, I think we can agree that reading is a fundamentally important life-skill and one that is best fostered in the early years of school . Reading is the means by which students engage with the academic curriculum and have the opportunity to succeed at school. The downstream benefits of successful early reading achievement yield the kinds of investment returns we can only dream of for our financial portfolios. When students become proficient readers in a timely and smooth way, they are more