To my enormous pride, my six-year-old daughter is an excellent reader. In Reception, she raced through the colour-coded chart of Biff & Chip books with ease and wound up bored. So bored that she took to jumping off trees with increasing exuberance each playtime. She needed to be stretched, the school decided, with only a hint of exasperation.

Stretch her we did. That summer, we read T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats aloud, laughing at the names Bombalurina and Macavity. We read Eleanor Farjeon’s Kings and Queens and wondered at how we were all Elizabethans. We read The Diary of Anne Frank and thought about annexes. We read Judith Kerr’s magisterial When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and she packed her own evacuee suitcase.

Reading became a chore, each sentence sullenly tripping off my daughter’s tongue before she ran off

Back at school, the books given to her to read were, inevitably, dull. Dull for me to listen to and, it appeared, dull for her to read; Surprise Pancakes for Mum, anyone? Reading became a chore, each sentence sullenly tripping off her tongue before she ran off and I resumed unloading the dishwasher. There’s a reason for this: children need to practise repetitive phonetics and see sentence structure in its infancy to progress.

But still. In the spring term, it was decided that she should become ‘accelerated’, an unusual accolade for a child in Year One. Her delight at this new epithet was beyond measure. ‘I’m accelerating,’ she declared to anyone who would listen. My mother, bemused, wondered........

© The Spectator