“Primary school children are abandoning books for computer games, as parents struggle to find the right balance between play, 1 , reading and electronic entertainment at home,” Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, said yesterday.
Mr. Balls called 2 parents to cut down on the amount of time they let their children play computer games and urged them to 3 at least ten minutes a night reading bedtime stories.
He added that a recent consultation by his department 4 (find) a huge groundswell of concern among parents about how best to regulate their children’s computer play.
“Across the country we should be getting our kids to play computer games a bit less and to read a bit 5 ,” he said.
His comments followed the publication of a major international comparison of reading among ten-year-olds which showed that England had fallen from third to fifteenth position in the
_6 five years. Scotland fell from fourteenth to twenty-first place in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, run by Boston College in Massachusetts. Russian children came top in the study.
The literacy report for England, produced for the Government by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), found that 22 percent of English children spent five hours or more 7 computer or video games on a normal school day, with 37 percent spending more than three hours. This was exceeded only by the US and seven 8 countries.
The report also found a clear association 9 the number of books at home and reading attainment. The 23 percent of children with 200 or more 10 at home had significantly higher reading scores than the 10 percent with ten or fewer books.
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