TOMORROW’S budding writers are so trapped in the educational “rat wheel” that they have no time to read the masters of their craft, the Poet Laureate complained yesterday.

Andrew Motion said that students often embarked on his creative writing course without even having read Great Expectations and they had to be guided towards Austen, Waugh and Greene.

Mr Motion made his comments as he announced his departure from the University of East Anglia, where for eight years he has led the country’s most acclaimed writing course. He blamed the curriculum and exam pressures for creating students who, like 19th-century Staffordshire figurines, were “painted only on the front”.

“We turn out students from schools and into universities who have not been educated in a rounded way,” he said. “We know what’s happened to art and music in schools. It’s happening to reading as well. There is incredibly little time allowed for reading. They bone up on their (set) texts, thinking they will only get questions on those. That means that if they are examined on Bleak House, they don’t have to read Great Expectations.”

He now had to make far more suggestions to his students who were, he said, “really hungry” for reading. “They completely took the point that they couldn’t do it themselves without doing all this reading. (At school), they had wearily accepted being driven by the educational rat wheel, which doesn’t give them more time to read.”

Mr Motion spoke to The Times after announcing his decision to move from Norwich — whose alumni include Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan — to a new creative writing chair at London University’s Royal Holloway college.

Mr Motion took over the direction and expansion of the UEA Creative Writing MA programme when Sir Malcolm Bradbury retired in 1995. “It’s worked well with a high rate of success,” he said. “Of my recent graduates, more than 15 have got contracts or had their first books come out.”

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