Despite its title, this book is not about teaching reading and writing in the initial stages. It is aimed at the middle school years and should perhaps be called “Teaching Writing through Reading and Imitating Literature, especially Poetry”.

It is in the anti-Gradgrind tradition that distinguishes between education and schooling. Although it refers to the prescriptions of the national literacy strategy, its intention is subversive - as education is always subversive, encouraging people to think and feel for themselves.

The book’s aim, in this age of testing, is to return the holiness to education. Typically, a chapter begins by outlining an issue, then cites a passage from a novelist or poet to act as text for discussion with children and as a model for their writing, and follows this with examples of the children’s writing. More than once, the quality and poignancy of the children’s work brought a tear to my eye. Sedgwick is an inspiring teacher.

He propagates the idea that all English can be learned through poetry, because poetry is where language is at its most precise and self-aware. Children learn to know and to express themselves from their critical appreciation of good writing, especially poetry.

But this appreciation is achieved less by academic study than by learning through performance (for example, reading a poem well aloud) and imitation (that is, recognising and exploiting styles and structures for their own purposes).

Sedgwick emphasises the importance of formal constraints: “Children do not need ideas for what to write aboutI Those ideas are inside their hearts and their heads. What they need are not ideas, but structures in which to contain those ideas.”

If this is the first book of Sedgwick’s you have read, you will find it inspiring and his personal style, after more academic books, refreshing. If you have read others of his, then you may feel that he is becoming self-indulgent - he includes autobiographical anecdotes and poems of his own which do not always earn their keep. And you may feel that he has written the same book many times over, with different examples. He should be sure that he has something new to say before writing his next.

Nicholas Bielby