Reading is my passion as I’ve said many times before in this column, so I was interested to read that a recently published report by researchers at UCL’s Institute of Education has called into the question the current practice of teaching reading by phonics (the learning of individual letter sounds and the blending of them together to read the word).

At present, the DfE (Department for Education) advocates phonics as the best thing to happen for reading for decades and they back this up with data from phonics screening tests taken by Year 1 children.

However, what this data really tells us is that Year 1 children have become very good at passing the test as that’s what the teaching is aimed at.

In fact, the research from UCL looked at three different models of learning to read and it comes as no surprise to educators up and down the land that a ‘balanced approach’ is deemed the most successful for accessing all learners.

This approach covers not just the letter sounds and blending the words together but looking at other clues from the text and reading for meaning.

The real problem with phonics is that it can lead to learners who can sound out words but don’t understand what the sentence means. Reading has to be more than just the mechanical sounding out of letters.

Sadly, all too often these days learning is tied to data and while I do understand that teachers have to be accountable, all too often it reduces children to a series of statistics.

One initiative many schools have bought into to deal with reading and data collection is a system called Accelerated Reader (AR). It is another real bugbear of mine - I really dislike it.

AR works on the basis that books for children and young people are given a numeric level. The child is assessed and given a range which corresponds with these levels and those are the books that the student is encouraged to read.

Each book also has a points value and on completion of the book the student must take a quiz, earning points for the number of correct answers.

Sounds harmless enough, but what about those young people who want to read a book not on the list? What about those that want to read a book that’s written for adults? Or those that want to read something that’s ‘lower’ than their range? There aren’t many non-fiction books on the system, are they not deemed relevant?

This system has reduced reading to something transactional. Where’s the joy in that?

We should be encouraging our youngsters to read whatever takes their fancy - there shouldn’t be a hierarchy about what makes good and bad reading.

And the worst part? The books are ‘levelled’ by a computer algorithm using such things as number of pages and number of words. What about nuances in the text and reading for meaning?

In my professional career, I come across adults with low levels of literacy within the Prison Service and I see the effects of these low literacy levels on life choices and opportunities.

Illiteracy is a very real issue in certain parts of our society. Perhaps if we were to be celebrating the joy of reading for pleasure with our children- not for the curriculum, we wouldn’t still have young adults leaving education that struggle to read at all.

If you have young people at home or in the family that aren’t so keen to get their heads in a book, I heartily recommend getting down to the library.

Libraries are such a great resource and one of the few things left that are truly free to use.

Sometimes, becoming a reader can be as simple as having a wider range of books to choose from and the permission to go for it - never mind the level, the score or the educational value of the chosen book.