Primary school children are abandoning books for computer games, as parents struggle to find the right balance between play, homework, reading and electronic entertainment at home, Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, said yesterday.

Mr Balls called on parents to cut down on the amount of time they let their children play computer games and urged them to spend at least ten minutes a night reading bedtime stories.

He added that a recent consultation by his department had found a huge groundswell of concern among parents about how best to regulate their children’s computer play. But he stopped short of recommending a maximum daily dose of electronic games.

“Across the country we should be getting our kids to play computer games a bit less and to read a bit more,” he said.

His comments followed publication of a major international comparison of reading among ten-year-olds which showd that England had fallen from third to fifteenth position in the past five years. Scotland fell from fourteenth to twenty-first place in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, run by Boston College in Massachusetts. Russian children came top in the study.

As the study measures comparative performance of reading among 4,000 10-year-olds in 40 countries, there is no evidence that reading standards have fallen in England, only that other countries have caught up and overtaken English children.

The study did show, however, that English ten-year-olds were now reading less at home than they did five years ago. The fall was particularly high among the highest-achieving children. Mr Balls suggested that this was because today’s ten-year-olds had more choice than in 2001 about how they spent their free time.

“Most of them have their own TVs and mobiles, and 37 per cent are playing computer games for three hours or more a day – more than in most countries in the study,” he said.

The literacy report for England, produced for the Government by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), found that 22 per cent of English children spent five hours or more playing computer or video games on a normal school day, with 37 per cent spending more than three hours. This was exceeded only by the US and seven other countries.

Although the report concluded that time playing computer games was linked to poor results in the tests, it did not say how. There are no direct comparisons between 2001 and 2006 for computer-game playing.

The report did find, however, that the proportion of teachers in England failing to set reading homework had risen from 4 to 11 per cent in the past 5 years. The proportion of teachers devoting more than 3 hours a week to teaching reading fell from 88 to 80 per cent.

The report also found a clear association between the number of books at home and reading attainment. The 23 per cent of children with 200 or more books at home had significantly higher reading scores than the ten per cent with ten or fewer books.

The proportion of children who never read outside school had increased significantly since 2001.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, said: “It’s time the Government stopped blaming parents and accepted the case we’ve been making for a new focus on teaching reading using tried and tested methods, with a test after two years in primary school to ensure our children are being taught properly.”

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