They may feel unwelcome and pressurising, especially when they carry no real significance in the child’s life outside the classroom. Reading, for many children, is not fun because they find it an effort, or a struggle. Reading, after all, is difficult.The activity of reading generates expectations of, and pressures on, children both at home and at school. At school, the national literacy strategy and league tables of test results combine to push children harder than ever – arguably, a good thing in terms of their future literacy scores, but not an approach that necessarily keeps their enjoyment to the fore.”Reading seems to be becoming a task and a toil, rather than something that is so much fun, you can’t help but read,” says Annabelle Dixon, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University faculty of education and a former primary teacher.

“I’m very conscious that many children struggle to get to a certain level in their reading; but when they do get there, instead of being able to consolidate and feel comfortable with that – which is where the enjoyment comes in – they are pushed on to a new, harder book.”The danger of the new literacy hour, says Elaine Millard, in Sheffield University’s education department, is that it can stop teachers from attending to the pleasures of reading. “Because it is quite prescriptive, teachers are looking for books which illustrate particular grammatical points; and I’ve heard reports of them spending too much time on quite limited stories as a result.”Parents, too, can be over-zealous in their choice of aspirational reading for their children, and be very dismissive of books a child chooses to read because they are “too easy”.My local bookshop on a Saturday afternoon pulsates with eager parents attempting to choose books with or for their children in an atmosphere of testing frenzy. “Let’s see if we can find a book which has some of your recent spellings in it,” one mother chides her daughter. And when a small boy asks his parents to buy him a densely-written book about aliens, they actually stand over him and make him read the first paragraph out loud, before they’d buy him the book.The daily home plod through pages of the school reading book is, all too frequently, not an occasion for fun, either. Recent research by Exeter University found that parents tend to concentrate on getting their children to decode the words on the page unaided, rather than trying to enjoy the book with them, by talking about the story and pictures, explaining words or phrases, guessing what might happen next.Reading at home should be much more than parents’ dutiful extension of what they think happens in school, if children are to find reading relevant to their lives, says Keith Topping, at the centre for paired learning in Dundee University’s psychology department, schools should place more value on a wider range of literacy sources in homes and communities, he says; not just storybooks, but papers, magazines, manuals and other kinds of environmental print.Seeing other people reading is crucial in giving children the idea that reading might be worthwhile.

Even in homes that are well supplied with books it might be rare for a child to see an adult actually relaxing with one. An older sibling prostrate on the sofa and glued to a book can be an excellent model; so can a teacher, absorbed in a book of her own, while her class reads quietly.Becoming “a reader” is, in many ways, a much harder and more critical step than those early days of learning to read, when the child decodes words on the page, c-a-t spells cat. But Alan Davies, national director of THRASS (Teaching Handwriting. Reading and Spelling Skills), argues, however, that inadequate decoding skills – the result of poor phonics teaching, in his view – play a big part in giving a child the sense, early on, that reading is not fun, because they find it too difficult to get the words right. “The more successful they are at it, the more they enjoy it – and so do their parents,” he says.Around the age of seven, most children have become reasonably adept at decoding, but need to find interesting reading material to take them on. This is the age when many boys, in particular, begin to lose interest in stories (A parent still reading aloud to them at this age…