Should children read by the age of six?

[NKF]

David Cameron seems to think they should.

ReallyTired - I agree with your 2nd post.

I suppose that something is going wrong by the fact that inspite of a massive increase in spending that 20% of children still leave primary school without the reading skills to cope with secondary.

What is truely shocking is that parents with a severely dyslexic child have to fight tooth and nail for additional help.

How come they got similar standards in 1946 inspite of the fact the classes were incredibably large by modern standards and there were no LSAs or computers? Are schools spending their money in the most effective way?

Prehaps there are children with major learning difficulties but I don't believe it is as high as 20%.

I agree that some word recogntion is necessary, but Rome wasn't built in a day. Decodable books gives a child in the early stages a sense of sucess. Just as you would not take a beginner driver on the M25 it is not reasonable to expect a child in reception to recongise all the tricky words in the English language.

For those wondering what they were meaning by 'able to read', this is from BBC:

Mr Gove told BBC's Andrew Marr Show: "We think by the time a child has been through two years of primary school, reception year and year one, they should be able to decode effortlessly, they should have mastered the building blocks of reading.

As you say Blu, we already have a very good idea (and do throughout the year) of which children are going to be adequate decoders by the end of Y1, and which need more support. I do wonder what this would mean for EAL learners, who have to work 2x as hard to meet national levels, particularly at the end of Y1. Of my current Y1 class, I would say that 65% might hit that description of being 'able to read'. The another 20% probably there by end of Y2, with the right support. For the remaining 15%, it will be a school long struggle. What happens if they are not 'able to read'? Does it change anything that we do anyway? Or does it just give the government another nice set of statistics, with which to create new initiatives?

I read that and wondered what being able to decode effortlessly means. To me that means being able to pick up say a chapter book and just read it. Maybe having to decode at a slower pace only a few of the more complicated words, like the world complicated . My eldest isn't 6.5 yet and in year 2 and I'd say he's only just really clicked with reading effortlessly. He also hadn't spent 2 years in school by the end of year one because they're not allowed to start school until the term before they turn 5. Being a summer baby he only had 4 terms in school before the end of year one.

Sorry, where I live they're not allowed to start school until the term before they turn 5.

I'd be more impressed at efforts to ensure children can read well by the time they are, say, 10 than by this.

people in some countries don't even go to school till they're 7.

the last thing kids in england need is another flipping test.

My biggest worry is where will teachers find the time to put in the extra work to get some children thru this proposed test? My 5 yr old Y1 dd only gets to read once or twice a week at the moment due to the fact the teacher has 29 other children to read with.

I am a huge advocate of kids being able to read early, and agree with the learn to read, read to learn theory but am also aware that for some dc it is a long journey which needs lots of time and patience. Where is this extra time going to come from? Surely other subjects would suffer?

but the problem with this country though expat is that our education system relies on our children being able to read in order to learn.

After seeing the documentary that was on about senior school children unable to read, and how it was affecting them, more def needs to be done to prevent children reaching the age of 12 and being illiterate.

I really don't see why we need more tests though, surely a teacher should know which of her pupils cannot read! More money needs to be put into providing support to those children, rather than on paperwork and testing.

in schools i have worked in, their were often paired reading schemes, where older, often top set kids, would sit down for fifteen minutes reading with year 7's and 8's.
in ds's primary school, last year, they did this too. as a year 5 he was reading with a year 2 child. the year 6 read with year3's. it helped with the reading, but also with the social skills side of things.
i think the time was taken from assembly, or registration times. took place in the library in the secondary school, and the librarian did the register i think, worked brilliantly.

fwiw, the kid i taught who had esl, actually had far less problems with reading than some of the others. i'm sure a whole mix of reasons for that. but they were never the kids who stressed me out for not being able to read.

The countries where children do not start formal school until 6 or 7 have it spot on. I feel so sorry for children in this country.

The pressure to excel academically as soon as they pop out of the womb is undignified, inappropriate and totally unnecessary.

No wonder so many are turned off school - they are burnt out!

What I want to know is, what happens to those children who can't read by the age of 6? Do they get sent back for reprogramming or humanely destroyed?

And what constitues 'being able to read'? By some benchmarks my DS#1 couldn't read at 6. He can now.

Load of old b*llocks.