The government has allowed a situation to develop where the word "reading" has come to mean something narrow and functional, no more than evidence that a child can read. This is an abdication of what education is about.

Along with many other writers, I think this is becoming a matter of some urgency. Children's author Alan Gibbons has initiated a Campaign for the Book which now has several hundred signatures.

There is a reading policy in place in schools, based mainly on the teaching of sounds and letters and the constant questioning of children following the reading of short excerpts from books. Sats at ages seven and 11 which produce a way of reading that is dominated by the "facts" of a piece of writing and knowing the "right" order of events in a story. All this is compulsory.

We know that the ability to take on complex ideas, to handle the notion of a multiplicity of viewpoints, to deal in abstract thought relies on a person's experience of reading widely and often – in combination with open-ended but challenging discussion. This process has slipped out of the school gates. There are hundreds of schools where it is not happening.

I understand that more and more children under the age of 10 go to bed without having something read to them or reading something themselves. Instead, there are more and more TVs in children's bedrooms and they are going to sleep watching TV.

Yes, the government does support a wide range of very worthwhile initiatives, but they are just that: voluntary activities from NGOs and charities such as Volunteer Reading Help – all of which I also support.

However, there is no national policy for schools and the reading of whole books, no policy on schools and their own libraries (many are closing) nor how they should coordinate their activities with the local public library; many have no relationship with the local library.

There is no national policy on how schools should involve parents in reading, for example, through the employment of school-home reading liaison workers. I could go on.

So how to formulate such a policy? The government should help organise regional conferences for teachers, writers, librarians, advisers, inspectors, the reading NGOs and charities to discuss what might be the best policies to encourage the reading of whole books. Each of the regional conferences could produce documents, and this could form the basis of a national policy on the reading of books.

The parents who read with their children and fill their houses with books produce the highest achievers. The rest are not helped to see that it's through wide-ranging reading that their children can develop and improve. Instead, such parents are led to believe that it is the diligent doing of homework that will do the trick – homework, which night after night, is not much more than form-filling and puzzles.