THE head of Ofsted issued a rebuke to thousands of primary schools yesterday for a continuing failure to teach children to read properly.

David Bell attacked a culture of low expectations in a hard core of primaries, saying that the teachers “almost always” blamed everyone but themselves for their pupils’ inability to read. He said that teachers in some schools still lacked the knowledge to teach reading seven years after the national literacy strategy was established to raise standards.

“All children should be able to read. It is as simple as that,” Mr Bell said as he published an Ofsted report on the teaching of reading in primary schools. “It is unacceptable that too many children do not learn to read properly because the adults who teach them lack sufficient knowledge to do so effectively. This might have been understandable a decade ago, but not today.”

He pointed the finger at 2,500 primaries, one in seven of the total in England, where at least a third of pupils fail to reach Level 4, the expected standard, in the national curriculum English test for 11-year-olds.

Mr Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, said: “If we have got that number of schools where less than 65 per cent of children are achieving Level 4 that should give us substantial cause for concern.”

He criticised a “lacklustre approach” witnessed by his inspectors at some schools, saying that urgent government intervention was required if pupils were to be rescued from illiteracy. There was an unacceptable gap in attainment between schools serving similar communities. Standards in some had actually declined since the literacy strategy was introduced in 1998. He said that rather than facing up honestly to their failings, teachers in weak schools operated a “culture of blame” in which they attributed pupils’ illiteracy to a lack of parental support or impoverished backgrounds.

“It is simply not good enough for some schools to lay the blame for low reading standards on the children, parents or outside influences,” Mr Bell said. “I encourage them to ask the question, ‘Why are others succeeding? What are they doing that we are not?’ The answers are there and are not difficult to find.”

Heads of successful schools, he said, led efforts to teach reading, which was too important to be left to individual classroom teachers. Pupils who struggled were given swift and effective help to stop them falling behind their peers.

The chief inspector’s unusually blunt assessment came just weeks after the Government celebrated the first rise for four years in the pass rate at 11. This year, 78 per cent achieved Level 4, an increase of three percentage points. Mr Bell endorsed the “rigorous and timely” use of traditional phonics methods, once scorned by “progressive” teachers, as soon as children entered school.

Successful primaries used systematic daily teaching of phonics. Those that failed to make progress were slow to use phonics because they expected too little of pupils. Mr Bell said that all children should be competent readers by the age of 7 and “pretty searching questions” had to be asked of any school in which a large number were not. The literacy strategy took much of the credit for a significant improvement in reading standards since a damning Ofsted report in 1996.

However, Mr Bell said that it was “greatly disappointing” that so many children could read now, but often chose not to. Schools should use libraries more imaginatively to offer more interesting material to read. “We need to ask whether schools are doing enough to capture children’s enthusiasm and to explore their own interests,” he said. However, Mr Bell dismissed as “bunkum” claims that children would enjoy reading more if schools were allowed to abandon the literacy strategy. “There is no pleasure in not learning to read and I, for one, do not want to return to the so-called good old days when many more children weren’t taught how to read properly,” he said.

Stephen Twigg, the Schools Minister, insisted that reading standards had improved significantly. The number of schools where less than 65 per cent of pupils achieved Level 4 had fallen by two thirds since 1997. “We know that there is a tale of underachievement — schools which could, and should, be doing better, even taking account of their circumstances,” he said.

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