I was lucky. Every Saturday afternoon I would walk the mile or so to the local library with my mum and dad and we would choose the week’s reading.

I was lucky, too, in that I went to primary school in the 1950s. Mrs Sulley taught me the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they represented. That is what primary school teachers used to do in those dim and distant days, and, as a consequence, to the best of my memory we all learnt to read.

Fifty years on, a quarter of 11-year-olds don’t. They leave primary school unable to read and write well enough to deal with the demands of the secondary school timetable. They play truant, they take refuge in disruptive behaviour, and, not surprisingly, they end up with little or no qualifications to show for their 11 years of formal schooling.

Why? Is learning to read really such a monumental intellectual challenge? Why, when the government has spent nearly £600m on its National Literacy Strategy, does state education continue to fail so many children? Learning to read may or may not be difficult; learning to teach children to read seems these days to be a near impossible task. The problem, according to the school’s inspectorate — the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) — is that one in 10 heads have not the faintest idea what to do. They do not know how to teach children to read. Their teachers flounder in a sea of uncertainty. Expectations of children’s progress are dismal. The children, ever eager to please, quickly assume that, in the words of last week’s Ofsted report, they are “rubbish at reading” and are never going to crack the code.

The Ofsted solution? More “policy” (whatever this means), more guidance, more training, more public money sprayed at the problem.

It ought by now to be obvious that more of the same is not going to work. The problem is not ultimately the head teachers and teachers. It is the fact that the “experts” responsible for the policy, guidance and training do not understand what Mrs Sulley, bless her heart, grasped intuitively. Namely, that children have to be taught to decode the squiggles on the page. They have to learn to recognise the letters “c”, “a” and “t”. They have to be taught the sounds these letters represent so that when they meet the letters again in words they have not seen before they can apply their knowledge and work out the new word.

Yes, I know. Some children learn to read with no trouble and precious little intervention. We only have to breathe on them and they have got it. The majority, however, have to be taught. It is not that difficult and, done well, by an imaginative teacher, it can be a great deal of fun.

However, they are never going to read until they can decode without thinking about it, and they are not going to be able to do this if they have the misfortune to be taught by teachers who have swallowed the guidance the government has spent the past seven years promoting.

It would be nice if the chief inspector of schools in England and Wales, David Bell, understood this. He does not. In his introduction to last week’s Ofsted report he said that he hoped the report would “stimulate discussion on the range of approaches used in successful schools to ensure that all pupils are learning to read”.

He appears to recognise the importance of “phonics” (teaching letters and sounds) but he still sits on the fence. We need, he says, a range of approaches, “searchlights” as they are called in the national literacy strategy. We do not. In the crucial early years of a child’s education we need phonics and only phonics. Get the foundations right so that children can decode effortlessly and everything follows.

Parents I meet know this. Teachers who have the good fortune to be trained by someone who understands the issues take no persuading. The problem is the arrogance of the expert and the gullibility and pusillanimity of the politician who fails to stand up for what is little more than common sense.

Change is not going to come from the top. If it happens, it will be because parents refuse to tolerate the present intolerable situation. What progress is your child making? What methods are his or her teachers using? What are their expectations? These are hard questions to ask. You may find it difficult to penetrate the jargon and complacency. Persevere. If you are not happy with the teacher’s replies ask to see the head teacher and if you are still unconvinced raise your concerns with the school’s governing body.

Nothing is more important than learning to read and no aspect of education is more prone to expert posturing. Talk to other parents. Do your homework. Cut through the defensiveness and obfuscation. Inspectors and politicians are not going to make the difference. If there is a problem in your child’s school with reading, it has to be you.