HC Deb 11 December 1997 vol 302 cc1179-80
13. Mrs. Brinton

If he will make a statement on the literacy strategy. [18759]

Mr. Byers

The national literacy strategy is an ambitious programme for achieving our target of 80 per cent. of 11-year-olds reaching the expected standard for their age in English by 2002.

Next year, we shall invest £50 million in training for teachers and in providing new books for schools. All local education authority applications for funding have now been received and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be announcing individual allocations before Christmas.

Mrs. Brinton

I thank my hon. Friend for his reply. I speak as a former English teacher. Does my hon. Friend agree that summer literacy schools are one of the most effective ways of bringing literacy—reading and writing—to young people, especially those in disadvantaged communities? Is he prepared to comment on the recent evaluation of pilot projects that were held this summer? Is he aware that in my constituency of Peterborough we held two very successful projects at Bretton Woods community school and John Mansfield school? Those projects will be run again in 1998; will my hon. Friend visit them next summer, meet some of the young people and share with them in their achievement?

Mr. Byers

Thanks to the east coast main line, during one of my return visits to my constituency on Tyneside next summer I might stop off at Peterborough to visit either of those schools—I know that they did good work this summer. Because of the success of the 50 summer literacy schemes held this year, we are pleased that there will be a tenfold expansion to 500 summer schools to take place next year. That is a positive way of providing new opportunities for young people and ensuring that when they enter secondary education they have the basic skills that they need in being able to read and write effectively.

Mr. Bercow

Does the Minister agree that in formulating a literacy strategy an emphasis on traditional methods is important and welcome, and that there should therefore be no role whatever for the three left-wing academics who observe in a pamphlet that within the psycho-semiotic framework, the shared reading lesson is viewed as an ideological construct where events are played out and that Children must learn to position themselves in three interlocking contexts"?

Mr. Byers

Clearly there is a role for summer literacy schools for the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). Many of us on the Labour Benches who entered the House in 1992—I accept that he did not—find it very difficult to take lessons from the Conservatives on reading in our schools when the one programme that they ran to support reading in schools, the reading recovery programme, was scrapped by the previous Government in 1995.