I am writing concerning the story ‘Teacher battles book ban’ (May 30). The teacher is complaining about GCSE guideline reading material, then goes on to mention disadvantaged children’s backgrounds where they are not encouraged to read.

I understand it’s better for children to enjoy what they are reading, but the real problem is a total lack of reading and writing hours within infant schools.

If a child heading towards GCSEs is struggling, then that child’s problems occurred years before when the teaching regime removed most teaching hours. By age seven in 1960, I must have received around 1,500 hours literacy teaching at 20 hours per week. Today, children get fewer than two hours weekly up to age seven.

Before 2009, the statutory minimum literacy teaching hours for KS1 were five, weekly.

But if we add five ‘ability sets’ to that, the statutory hours are down to only one hour per child per week, breaking the law, and that law was being broken since the 1960s, creating an ‘underclass’.

New Labour removed that law in 2009, making it legal to have no literacy teaching for infants.

S. NICHOLSON Campbell Road, Oxford

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