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Over a quarter of British five-year-olds struggle with reading and basic vocabulary, a problem with long-lasting consequences in terms of future employment and life opportunities. The government has a plan to solve that. More libraries? Better preschool education in childcare centres? Almost: free smartphone apps.

Earlier this month, education secretary Damian Hinds announced his plan to halve the number of children starting school with inadequate speaking and reading skills by 2028.


Figures collected by the Department for Education (DfE) show that 28 per cent of four and five-year-olds do not meet the basic communication and literacy levels. A recent survey of teachers by Oxford University Press suggests that the problem is getting worse.

DfE research shows that children who have a limited command of vocabulary at age five are twice as likely to be unemployed at age 34 as their more articulate peers. “When you’re behind from the start, you rarely catch up: your peers don’t wait, the gap just widens. This has a huge impact on social mobility,” Hinds said in a speech at the Resolution Foundation.

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A spike in illiteracy is exactly the kind of conundrum one would expect the government to tackle with a serious plan and a meaningful investment programme. No such luck. Hinds’ proposed fix is at the best a facile half-measure, and at worst a diversion act: we’ll use smartphones.

Given the ongoing techlash, Hinds couldn’t just rattle off a standard blue-sky, tech-will-solve-it routine. He had to pull off a bit of a balancing act: ahead of the speech, he threw a bone to the technosceptic crowd, acknowledging “legitimate worries” about kids’ “screen time”, and even pontificating on Fortnite’s dangers; then, he announced a competition to find mobile apps that can alleviate illiteracy.


“If our phones and apps can help us bank, shop, diet, exercise and figure out where we are. Why not also help us with helping our children develop their communication and reading?,” Hinds said. “That is why the department will be launching a competition to identify high quality apps, with the aim of making these free and easily accessible, making sure that disadvantaged families don’t miss out.”

The idea might have earned Hinds some credibility with fans of mobile technology, circa 2010, but the question remains: can one really pretend to solve a literacy crisis via smartphone app? Probably not.

Lisa Guernsey, director of the Learning Technologies Project at New America, worked as part of a research team to examine the packaging of literacy apps in the app store. She remains guarded about the potential benefits of smartphone apps.

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“Based on studies and evidence that I have reviewed, it is incorrect to make a blanket statement that apps can improve literacy skills,” she says. According to her research, the most popular apps were not designed to support a full range of literacy skills, focusing instead on basic skills such as letter identification or the association between letters and sounds.


“Many apps do not divulge any information about their developers, and among those that do, very few of them stated that their development team included a literacy expert,” she says. “Developers may be focusing on just a few of the skills that children must master to learn to read."

A study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly similarly indicates that the use of some literacy apps can foster “letter knowledge, print concepts, and name writing skills.”

“Reading with an adult and practicing these skills with a parent at home will always be the ideal scenario,” says Colleen Russo Johnson, co-director of the Children’s Media Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. “But we know this is not always the case, and it’s better to supplement with something rather than nothing,” she says.

The point is whether the choice should really be between an app and nothing. The government’s “there’s an app for that” attitude is particularly jarring, coming after years of cuts to education. An analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that spending per pupil in England's schools has fallen by eight per cent since 2010. In the same period, 478 public libraries have closed across the UK.

The closures have attracted criticism from both teachers and parents, with a survey showing that 82 per cent of parents believe that accessing a public library helps children get ready for school, and 85 per cent say it improves their speaking and listening skills.

“Now that many Children’s centres [hubs providing services and information to families with children under five] are closed, so much valuable work with families has gone and the use of an app cannot replace this,” says Sue Allingham, an education consultant specialised in the care of children below the age of five. “This is very much magical thinking. The money would be better invested in Children’s centres, Bookstart or quality provision,” she says.


A DfE spokesperson said that “new digital delivery routes offer a potentially cost effective and impactful way to reach disadvantaged children and their parents.” They also said that the government has worked on avoiding further closures, making £200 billion available to councils for local services, including libraries and children’s services.

But the situation on the ground looks quite different: Northamptonshire county council published proposals that could lead to drastic cuts to core services. East Sussex county council is preparing to cut back services to the bare legal minimum. According to the National Audit Office, which scrutinises public spending in parliament, up to 15 English council may find themselves in a similar situation in the next few years. As a result of years of austerity, local services could face an £8 billion funding gap by 2025, the Local Government Association revealed last month.

Technology has certainly a role to play in any effort to improve literacy, but it cannot replace everything else. As a standalone cheap solution, it risks accomplishing little to nothing. “Technology needs to be meaningfully implemented into libraries and schools, and thus in children’s lives,” Russo Johnson says. “It doesn’t matter how amazing an app is, we can’t simply hand a tablet off to a parent and expect it to be used in the intended way.”