By Adrian Mcllelan And Sammie Jones-
The department of education in the Uk alongside Ofsted has managed to raise the standard of education in many mainstream primary and secondary schools, but it is all too obvious why a number are still lagging behind,
Many schools give their pupils notes to copy in class but do not encourage them to take text books home. Behind the scenes with some writers and researchers from The Eye Of Media.Com and other organisations, it has become obvious that many pupils are weak because they do not read any text books when they get home. How they can be expected to develop just on notes given to them in class I don’t know.
Children should be encouraged to read to broaden their knowledge base and also enjoy what they are reading. There should be no young teenager who does not enjoy reading something when they get home, and the responsibility s on schools to establish this passion from a young age. Reading interesting story lines to children in primary schools goes a long way to building their passion. Making sure they understand the meaning of new words and can use them well n sentences is something that should be made fun in every primary school.
Reading can be made such an exciting experience from an early age that when the child grows up to secondary school , they enjoy the experience of reading and learning. A number of primary and secondary schools were told by this organisation in the past two days to actively encourage their pupils to take books home and read and express what they read when they return to school.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be in the form of homework, though homework is good training. The stimulation and development of the mind is a necessary aspect of growth and future potential maximising. It wasn’t with pleasure that we told five schools we had been watching through their pupils who are children of friends and associates, that they were not doing enough to bring the best out of their pupils. Surprisingly one of them had a good Ofsted rating, but that could be for other reasons which we will only find out once we delve deeper into researching the school.
Our conviction that pupils should be encouraged to take text books home to read is deep enough for us to openly criticise schools we find not doing so after pointing it out to them.Any teenager who never reads at home is very unlikely to be maximising their intellectual development even if they read at school during lessons.
The gains will not be the same as one who enjoys reading at home, not only school text books, but novels or books outside the curriculum. Pupils in every school should be encouraged to read a lot at least three times a week so that by the time they are preparing for their G.C.S.E’s, they are already well grounded in literacy skills
This article was contributed by both authours