Not up to us to teach children how to use books, say almost half of parents
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/teach-children-read-education-gap-toilet-training-dndkz9d8p
Posted by BestButtons
Not up to us to teach children how to use books, say almost half of parents
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/teach-children-read-education-gap-toilet-training-dndkz9d8p
Posted by BestButtons
48 Comments
If that’s you, you have failed your basic duties as a caring parent. Sort your damn shit out.
Such a mind blowing statistic I do find it hard to believe tho, most people are not that stupid right? 😣
Article contents:
*Nicola Woolcock, Education Editor, January 30 2025, The Times*
Almost half of parents believe children do not need to know how to use books before they start school, with some trying to ‘swipe’ as if they were phones or tablets.
A survey has found 44 per cent of parents believed it was not their responsibility to teach their children how to read books while 24 per cent did not think toilet training was essential for those starting school.
And some pupils are failing to develop core strength because of excessive screen time and the “Covid baby” excuse is too frequently used, according to the findings.
The annual school readiness survey by Kindred Squared, an early education charitable foundation, is based on focus groups and studies with more than 1,000 teachers and 1,000 parents of reception-aged children in England and Wales.
Sir Keir Starmer recently set a target that 75 per cent of children must be “school ready” by 2028, up from 68 per cent now. It is one of the six key milestones on which he said his party would be judged. Children’s level of development in literacy, maths, language and personal skills is usually measured at the end of the first year of school.
However the polling, published on Thursday, laid bare the extent of the challenge faced by schools during that reception year and the discrepancy between parental and teacher views.
Ninety per cent of parents questioned said their child was ready to start school but teachers say only 33 per cent were at this level.
Only 44 per cent of parents said children should know how to use books, not to swipe or tap on them, before starting reception. Meanwhile 76 per cent of parents think children should be toilet trained before starting reception, but 48 per cent are not concerned if teachers spend time toilet training pupils rather than teaching them.
Teachers say 25 per cent of children are not toilet trained and that 36 per cent struggle to play or share with other children.
A similar proportion — 34 per cent — do not know how to listen or respond to simple instructions, teachers say. As a result they lose an average of 2.4 hours of teaching time every day.
There is confusion among parents about what being ready for school means and whose job it is to ensure children develop the skills they need.
The lack of understanding is not helped by patchy information: 79 per cent of parents think they are receiving the right information, but only 48 per cent of teachers agree, and 41 per cent of parents had not heard about school readiness before their child joined reception.
About half of teachers and parents suggested the amount of screentime was partly to blame.
Felicity Gillespie, director of Kindred Squared, said: “We welcome the government’s pledge to get more children ‘school ready’ but our report suggests that too many parents are failing to support the development of their children, in spite of — we know — having their best interests at heart.
“We need to destigmatise how we talk about parenting in these critical years of development and as a nation begin to grasp that we’re all learners from birth, and that these early years have a massive impact on all our futures. The role of parents and carers as their child’s first educator really is crucial to their later life chances and the success of our society and economy. Our latest annual report highlights that the problems are both significant and stubborn.”
Teachers participating in the focus groups expressed concerns about the increasing severity of developmental delays in children entering reception. Observations included delays in basic motor skills including clumsy movements, dropping things and children unable to climb a staircase.
Others reported communication and language deficits, and limited attention spans and lack of core strength due to excessive screen time.
One reception teacher voiced concerns about children using Americanisms and “trash” language picked up from online content and another said there was a “health visitor crisis” in their area, resulting in development delays.
A teaching assistant from the northwest said: “So much of my day is just spent cleaning up or prompting that child to go to the toilet … And that lost time I could be giving to the other 20 children in the class. It has a negative impact on the rest of the children there.”
And some teachers felt the “Covid baby” explanation was becoming an excuse. One head teacher from the east Midlands said: “There’s only so long you can blame Covid for that. I’m sorry, but a lot of it comes down to parenting as well.”
Y…yes it is. As a parent, it is literally your job to teach your child basic skills. You can’t just abdicate all responsibility to schools and electronic devices
Boggles my mind that some households don’t have any physical books and parents never read to their children.
I can’t imagine bedtime without a book.
Before everyone comes at me with the cost of living crisis most of the books we read come from the local library for free.
Seriously? That’s basic parenting. We taught our daughter to read before she even went to primary school.
> **44 per cent** of parents believed it was not their responsibility to teach their children how to read books while **24 per cent did not think toilet training was essential** for those starting school … **48 per cent are not concerned if teachers spend time toilet training pupils** rather than teaching them
> 34 per cent — do not know how to listen or respond to simple instructions, teachers say. As a result they **lose an average of 2.4 hours of teaching time every day**.
Happy to have kids, but to take responsibility for them?
> And some teachers felt the “Covid baby” explanation was becoming an excuse.
I can’t see how that was ever a valid reason not to teach and train the basics to your child.
It is worse than this.
25% of the children attending school aren’t toilet trained.
So am all for getting the wee bastards to read. But not shiteing themselves seems to take precedence.
This is one of the saddest surveys I’ve seen to come out of the UK. A lot of my childhood memories are being read to at night. Getting my first library card and reading. Was always told reading is power as you can either read and take you to amazing places or empower you through learning. Heck, I’d be snookered if I wasn’t a good reader. Reading is what educated me on the world after leaving school at 16.
What are these almost half of surveys.
I am not denying that reading standards have plummeted . But 1000 in a focus group …. how exactly are these focus groups chosen, are they representative of the population at large , what questions are asked and how/ format . Statistics is a wide field and interpretations can be drawn unfortunately many a times to fit a preconceived notion.
“There is confusion among parents what ready to school means” ??
If this is genuinely held belief of nearly half of a representative sample then it is a horror story.
Edit : sample
Lazy, lazy, lazy. Just pop the kid out and do the very bare minimum.
As someone who is studying to become a teacher, seeing reports like this is so so worrying. Teaching is hard enough without entitled parents setting their children up for failure! Who will then, inevitably, blame their children’s shortcomings on the teachers. My mother read to me and my brother every single night in her bed. It was my favourite part of bedtime and it sent us to sleep every single time. We didn’t have iPad’s until we were around 10! Even then, we just played Minecraft & devices were monitored. I worry for Gen Alpha and the generation after it, they have not been dealt a fair hand.
Thank you for allowing my child a headstart over your child then
I never *taught* my kids how to turn a book’s pages, I simply read to them.
These articles are the first time I’ve heard of “school readiness” though, and my youngest is six, so it seems possible that many parents don’t know what targets they’re meant to be hitting by Reception?
The HV crisis described by one of the teachers is probably a factor in a lot of cases too – HVs are meant to be the first line in spotting developmental problems in young children, and making parents aware of targets.
My then-HV realised my middle son was likely to be autistic minutes into meeting him, and thanks to her, he was assessed and diagnosed before school age, with a place in SEN school lined up for Reception – something which I hear is less common these days.
I’ve encountered this attitude, but the idea it’s almost half is extremely depressing.
We need to laugh at these people and tell them how pathetic they are. We used to be a country.
Parents, and I am one, need to be reminded they are the first educators of their child, and the ones ultimately responsible for their children’s education. This attitude is disgusting and, frankly, their ancestors would be horrified. Education was a privilege keenly fought for in Britain, this attitude today is almost a return to barbarism
‘Once the social media attention from having a baby has gone, there’s no novelty so I just have YouTube raise it.’
I would not produce a child with a woman who thought like this.
The single biggest factor in social mobility is education. The biggest influence on a child’s attitude to education comes from the parents, predominantly the mother if I remember correctly. You’re almost killing a kids chances is life before it starts by not engaging with them.
If you’re not willing to engage with your child and help them develop, then why are you even a parent.
Your child reading is SO lame for instagram. Like it just doesn’t get the like so what are they meant to do?
Post shorts of them flicking through the pages???
/s
Depends what type of parent you are I suppose. A good one or a very bad one.
I’m not paying to read the times but I would be amazed if the reporting on that statistic was remotely accurate.
And then they wonder why kids just sit on phones, shit lazy parents, raise your fucking kids
Alarming. And these are the ones that keep getting babies, having no jobs and leeching on welfare
Remember that half of all people are below average intelligence just keep on remembering that
And if you want to point out the difference between mean, median, and mode then you’d be a half decent parent
And if anyone starts on about oxford commas Ill puke
I’m wondering how valid this claim is, while I’m sure there are some kids out there who only encounter a screen and never paper, there will be a majority who are encountering books, if only as colouring books, so they will know how to turn a page
How on earth did anyone come to this conclusion? I bet the same parents are happy to teach them how to use an iPhone though
New rules :
1.expulsion for kids who aren’t toilet trained. They can return when are.
2.social services will be called for kids showing signs of abuse, basic illiteracy being one of them.
There. Sorted!
That’s because the majority of people having kids now are uneducated and unemployed. The types of people who should be having kids realise the world is in a bad place, it’s far too expensive, and they do not have the time to spend with them due to borh working over 40 hours per week and then some.
Then half of parents are daft
Look times are hard but even if you are forced to commit neglect by work you should know that it’s up to you
This is actually quite disheartening. Parental engagement has so much effect on children’s education. These kids are already disadvantaged compared to other children.
So at least 50% of parents have zero business being parents then.
I start teacher training in September and this kind of stuff scares me
This feels like a problem with the way the parents have been taught about parenthood? Like, why do the parents think this? Who taught them to think this way?
We can be like “god this generation. Blah blah” but really, when did we stop teaching children how to parent? Just in general?
Is this real? I read to my daughter every night without fail. I’m actively planning which books we’ll read together as she gets older as it is joyful! What the fuck kind of shit parent doesn’t even think they need to show their child what a book is.
People have been screaming that our society is falling apart at the seams for years now. Here it is, no clearer evidence.
Cheetah: it’s not my job to teach my cubs how to hunt
Britain in 2025, everything is someone else’s job, no one is responsible for anything.
Ah fuck it, society has failed…
I have family in education and they have been saying for years it feels like most parents don’t want to teach their kids anything, not even how to use a toilet, 5 year olds in propper nappies is apparently almost normal now.
We are totally fucked.
This all started when boomer and GenX parents started going in to schools and shouting at teachers rather than their own kids.
Given that the average reading age of adults in the UK is 9 years old I find this very easy to believe.
What do they mean by “use” books? I couldn’t read before I started school in the mid ‘90s and I don’t think that was unusual back then? Not a single child in my class wasn’t toilet trained though. That is wild.
Also I guess this is more of a problem in England where the school start year is rigid? In Scotland you just start when you are ready. There were children jn the year below me who were older but weren’t socially ready for school when I started. As one lad put it, “they kept me back for biting folk in nursery”.
Tbf my parents never helped me read but i went to catholic school and inhad a nun poking me with her big boy fingers shouting “read it boy!”. Apparently i was way ahead of average for reading ability. Get yourself a nun
I grew up with a semi large solid friend group. Half of which were avid readers, the other half didn’t even have a book at home. Both sides used to make light jokes about the other side.
You can really see the difference between us as adults. The ones that read all have ‘good’ degrees and went off to have good careers, more money, travel, etc. (We are in our late twenties so things might change)
The ones that didn’t just floundered in adulthood. They stopped education at 16, one quit a levels half way through as she couldn’t cope. They are all struggling with money and in jobs they hate.
There is no other obvious correlation either. Friends that got As in GCSEs, lower middle class, had private tutors, but didn’t read. Struggled as an adult. Meanwhile the most deprived friends that got straight Cs, really grew into themselves and made it work.
Its all anecdotal of course, and I am defining success in a particular way. But the difference is insane.
And I am sure those who think that are the real big contributors to society, and definitely not the scroungers…
I had a little dig into the survey itself to find the actual wording of the question about books. It looks like it was presented as part of a question headed **Who do you think is most responsible for a child’s development of each of the following skills?** with **Ability to use books (no swiping or tapping as if using an electronic device)** presented as one of the options. Then parents could select one of the following options **Completely parents**, **Mostly parents, An even split**, **Mostly school**, **Completely school**. They counted completely or mostly answers only and totally ignored even split. If you include even split then it comes out to 85% who don’t think it’s completely or mostly on the school to teach kids about how to use books.
I do think you’d get a different answer if you changed the survey. Not just because of how many options there are but because of how the survey is worded. I put consumer facing surveys into the field every year and it is always surprising how just the tiniest change in how you word the question or the answer options can change the outcome. It matters how long the questionnaire is and how long each section is. People get bored and just start clicking.
This question was at the end of a block of 12 questions. That’s way too long to keep people engaged when they get their amazon voucher for just clicking any old answer. The wording sucks too. For this question you are going to get a lot of people think, well actually the school teaches children to read so it’s up to them to teach that while I support at home and quite reasonably select the even split. I think what the question actually means to ask is who is responsible for teaching your child to turn the pages of a book without tearing them or breaking the book.
TL;DR: Surveys design is hard to get right even if it is your bread and butter. You can make a survey say different things if you change the wording of the question and answer options.
I wonder if this comes from a place of lack of skills on the parent’s side. Apparently 1 in 6 (18% / 6.6 million people) adults aged 16 to 65 in England have very poor literacy skills. Only 50% of us read books for recreation. If so many adults lack the skills then perhaps them pushing the task onto teachers comes from a lack of fear/knowledge.
I’m not saying it’s right either way, but would likely explain it.
The problem is that the more we take money away from the average kid to supplement kids with bad parents the worse those parents get.
Kid A who turns up able to use stairs and knives and forks and count to 10 and go to the toilet learns nothing for 4 years while all the resources go to others.
So there is both a tax on good parenting and a subsidy for bad parenting.
How tf are almost half of parents saying this?
It is explicitly your fucking job. I’d consider myself a complete and utter failure as a parent if my kid didn’t understand what books are for.
Hopefully it’s not an anonymous survey, track these neglectful shits down.