The education secretary's commitment to raising standards is not in doubt - but is he placing a straitjacket on what should be the creative and enjoyable process of early learning?

Many educationists doubt the wisdom of more formal literacy and numeracy classes in the early years of school, and the government's top-down approach is meeting resistance. One union leader has complained that "even Joseph Stalin wasn't as prescriptive as this".

Gerry Northam reports for The World Tonight

For the six and seven-year-olds at St Anne's RC Primary School in Buxton, in the Peak District of Derbyshire, the government's introduction of a daily Literacy Hour has made this year's teaching more formal and structured.

But if it is part of a totalitarian imposition, then their teacher, Val Trivett, has not been reading the right script.

Sense of achievement

"Well there is a lot of planning, but once you've planned for the week, it works extremely efficiently and the results are good at the end of the week," she said.

"You feel that you have achieved something at the end of the week and the children have achieved something."

Lesson plans 'produce results'

The point of the government's insistence on a Literacy Hour is to raise standards, by bringing weak teachers closer to the level of the best. But talk privately to some of the government's own researchers, and there is serious doubt that this is happening.

After only two terms, it is too early for them to discuss their results publicly, but some are coming to share the academic scepticism of Prof John Eggleston of Warwick University's Institute of Education.

"There is no doubt that the teachers who are doing good literacy hours are for the most part the teachers who were good teachers in any case," he said. "And those teachers are doing a better job than they would have done before.

Widening the gap

"But there are other teachers who are going through the motions, doing them as efficiently as they can, but there is a superficiality about the results. They are teaching to the test, which is getting results, but it's on the top, it's froth."

Which paradoxically may mean that the government's prescription is widening the gap between the best and worst infant classes. How much of a risk is it, then, to extend more formal teaching to even younger children?

Children know they must get on with things

In the reception class, which children join when they are still four, every morning now begins with Literacy Hour - the whole class reading from a big book, then working in groups, then back together.

It has already brought markedly more structure for the children and their teacher, Judith Brassington.

"When they come in and they are brand new children, it's a nightmare, and the main objective of the whole class is to get the organisation into a rigid routine where they know exactly what happens next," she said

Need to explore

"Once that is established, we get to the stage we are at now, where children will go off and do their group work - they know they must not come to me, they know in the end they put the work in the middle of the table and they look for me for the plenary session."

Critics of the government's prescription argue that formalised teaching can be harmful for children of four and five, let alone three. They need to explore, learn about themselves and their classmates, and above all, to learn through play.

Prof Anning: "Sacrificing children for targets"

The official line is that a balance is needed, but with Literacy Hour every day to be joined next school year by the Numeracy Hour, Prof Angela Anning of Leeds University's School of Education fears that that the national strategy may rebound.

"The danger is that if children are asked to learn in a formal way too early, that they are turned off learning, they see themselves as not being good at learning," she said.

"So if we force such vulnerable young learners to do things that they really feel are too difficult for them at an early stage of schooling they'll not cultivate good dispositions to learn."

Last October, shortly after the Literacy Hour was introduced, the leading government researcher Prof Kathy Sylva, of Oxford University, appeared to support these concerns in an interview for the BBC Panorama programme.

"I think that any country that delays formal education until children are six, probably has it right," she said then.

"We have enough research evidence that young children - that's children under six, and certainly under five - really will have the best foundation for more formal learning, literacy learning, numeracy learning, in a more play-based early childhood programme."

Silence advised

Since that interview Prof Sylva has got the message from the Department for Education that a period of silence on her part would be advisable.

But the evidence she drew on is widely known - other European countries do better than England does in teaching literacy, and they start formal classwork later - often not until six or even seven.

Short-term gains may not last

Prof Eggleston fears that Britain is following instead the unhappy example set by the authorities in China.

"The government had dramatic literacy programmes and claim something like 100% success," he said.

"And yet studies of 25-year-olds in China indicate that 50% are illiterate, and the answer is of course that they were literate at 14, they had gone through the motions, they could respond to the tests, but they lost it."

Gamble

So what cost in the longer term? The influential American study called High/Scope took 15 years of follow-up to uncover significant failings of the formal teaching methods used for young children.

Prof Anning argues that the government cannot afford to take the same gamble here.

"The problem is while we are waiting for this evidence of course, we have got a generation of children who have only got one chance at deciding whether they are or are not good learners.

"That is quite frightening to think that we are going to sacrifice, if you like, groups of children for targets in a narrow particular version of achievements, when this may put some of these children at risk in the long-term in the education system."