Glued to their phones day and night, is it any wonder children’s reading skills are declining?

PUPILS in Scotland’s secondary schools do not read enough and they do not read sufficiently challenging books, a massive survey of youngsters in the British Isles has found.

And many – even as they prepare to sit their first, important national exams – have a reading age of only 13 and still largely favour the lightweight children’s stories first devoured in upper primary.

Moreover, while our primary schools put heavy emphasis on literacy skills and regularly set aside classroom time for private reading, the secondary curriculum is much more diffuse and reading time rarely granted.

‘This makes maintaining literacy levels among teenagers a persistent challenge for teachers and policy makers,’ says Dirk Foch, managing director of assessment technology firm Renaissance UK.

‘The fall in teenagers’ reading ages is striking. By the time many come to sit their National 4 and 5 examinations, many will have a reading age of 13 or less, meaning that they could even struggle to comprehend their exam papers. This could have a significant impact on their future academic success.’

The problem is by no means confined to Scotland, but it is shaming for a land once known as the ‘People of the Book’, with heavy Protestant emphasis on literacy and which once had a disproportionately large publishing industry.

‘The uniformity of the fall in literacy levels is striking as it cuts across boys, girls and all parts of the UK,’ says Professor Keith Topping of Dundee University, who has closely analysed the ‘What Kids Are Reading’ survey findings.

‘To avert a further slide in literacy levels in secondary schools, pupils should be encouraged to push themselves to read more difficult books.’

CERTAINLY, one trusts, books rather more demanding than Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, or David Walliam’s Gangsta Granny – seven pulpy titles in our teenagers’ top ten rated novels.

It is depressing because, in my boythe hood four decades ago, I read voraciously and read practically anything – as, I think, did most of my classmates.

I was signed up at our local library when I was eight. There were regular gifts of books outgrown by older cousins or youngsters in my Sunday school. Many of us, too, bought weekly bright but highly instructive magazines such as World of Wonder, Speed and Power and the sorely missed Look and Learn – its splendid features on history, science and technology leavened by the ‘Trigan Empire’ comic strip.

We stormed through the prolific works of one author to the point where I remember our Primary 7 teacher gently pronouncing, ‘You know, children, we really are now trying to wean you off Enid Blyton.’

But by then I had discovered Arthur Ransome, Roald Dahl, Gavin Maxwell and Robert Graves, and completed CS Lewis, Willard Price’s tales of jungle expeditions and FW Dixon’s slightly improbable exploits of the Hardy Boys.

I had knocked off George Orwell’s Animal Farm at nine and finished I, Claudius before I started secondary.

There were, of course, funny rules by those in power. My mother had a horror of comics and, however determinedly one hid them, they were apt mysteriously to disappear. Of three books I borrowed weekly from Knightswood Library, I was allowed two of Jennings or Just William as long as the third was worthy non-fiction. And I still do not dare read during meals in my parents’ presence and, of course, on Sundays only books of a Christian and religious nature were allowed.

My Primary 6 teacher made plain her disapproval of Doctor Who books, but those beloved Target paperbacks we prized.

When the TV series was revived in 2005, the BBC made known that, with DVD releases and home recording and so on, there were no plans for further Doctor Who novelisations. It is hard not to feel they missed a trick and it would have done wonders for boys who, probably, would read nothing else.

That’s a reminder, of course, that in the late 1970s we grew up in a very different environment. There was much less television – three channels, broadcasting only a test card for much of the day and shutting down soon after midnight with the National Anthem.

Most homes had only one set, usually in the main living room, and children’s viewing was closely monitored. On Sunday, at least in our house, we were not allowed to watch it at all.

I was never allowed a TV set in my bedroom and I cannot recall a classmate who was. And there were anomalies – though boys in my class took avidly to JRR Tolkien, I was nearly 40 before I dutifully read The Hobbit and the Lord Of the Rings. But now, well into the 21st century, books face far stiffer competition for children’s attention.

WE all sighed with relief when the Harry Potter craze took off and children by the million once more turned avidly to books. But the last of JK Rowling’s tales appeared in 2007, before the smartphone and when social media sites were in their infancy. I suspect they would fare much less well now.

I’ve read them all but, like pulp thrillers, or those awful Lewis whodunnits by Peter May, I never wanted to reread any of them. That, surely, is the litmus test of a good book.

By contrast, even middlebrow novels such as Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, or Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited will give you something new every time you reopen them.

Children now seethe in technology and it takes determined and indeed sacrificial parenting to prise them away from mobiles, tablets and laptops and put something in solid covers between their hands.

It helps if we are conspicuous readers ourselves and still more if we take time to read aloud to our offspring – but nowadays both parents usually work full-time and crawl wearily home each night. Sitting down with a squirmy six-yearold and Fantastic Mr Fox does not immediately appeal.

The new findings do not, of course, reflect great credit to the SNP administration and rather reflect the blobbiness of Curriculum For Excellence.

Our children are being taught too much and too thinly, rather than being grounded in the hardcore skills of what we used to call a critical education.

Too much in the school day seems little more than propaganda for social engineering.

Many Scottish comprehensives will tomorrow celebrate ‘Purple Friday’, with youngsters exhorted to don something purple and obediently fête LGBTI+ culture.

Meanwhile, the near-deserted school library will display such diverting titles as Footballers Earn Less Than Their Underpants Do as mounting no-platforming intolerance on our campuses attests how schools increasingly pump out young adults incapable of moral courage or original and independent thought.