And there is to be a new emphasis within the national literacy strategy on writing - the weak link.

Writing tends to be the weakest literacy skill

A new phonics course from the National Centre for Literacy and Numeracy is now being used in the schools identified as being in biggest need.

In the spring term it will be more widely available, and will be in most of England's primary schools by next summer.

The reason they are not all getting it at once - although they will all be getting the basic materials this year - is the cost of training teachers to use it effectively.

Phonics has always been part of the literacy strategy. In the first year it involves such things as exploring and playing with rhyming patterns - such as fat, hat, pat - and practising initial and final sounds in words - FiT, MaT, PaN.

"What we have done is to focus it," said the Director of the literacy and numeracy centre, John Stannard. "We think teachers can get through it more quickly."

At the moment it was "dragging on" into the third year of schooling, he said.

The main aim of the training is to get them to use effective whole-class strategies - games and other activities - to keep the children interested.

"The evidence is very convincing from good practice and from research as well, showing that it has a big impact on spelling and especially writing - that has to be a big priority in the next year," Mr Stannard said.

Teachers can intervene as children are writing

School inspectors have said the government's literacy strategy is paying off, but that more attention needs to be paid to writing.

Although the results of National Curriculum tests for 11-year-olds showed a 10% jump in reading abilities this year, writing performance improved only 3%.

And feedback from teachers suggests that there is a gap between the sort of extended, descriptive writing that the children are asked to do in the tests, and what they are getting to do in the literacy hours most schools now timetable as part of the national strategy.

These are fairly tightly structured sessions focusing on particular aspects of reading and writing, with an emphasis on whole class work, which do not allow for children writing anything at length.

'Armistice'

Mr Stannard acknowledges these concerns. But he says schools have always been told that the 'literacy hour' is not the only opportunity for literacy work.

Extended writing could be done across several literacy hour sessions, or in other areas of the curriculum.

And some schools, he said, had a 'Friday Armistice' - they did not do the literacy hour as such on one day a week, to allow for more extended writing.

But it was the time for concentrated teaching of specifics. The traditional way of doing it was to explain something to the children, get them to go away and do the writing, then check it afterwards.

"This picks up things the children need to know, but in retrospect, and randomly," Mr Stannard said.