Nine years ago Britain institutes a national literacy framework for teaching English. “But the framework has now become a double-edged sword – it provides schools with a common programme to ensure that children have a broad diet of fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry. It has helped us think about the way in which words, sentences and texts weave together. However, for many teachers the framework has become a strait-jacket that limits children’s progress. It has trapped us into ‘delivery’ mode with teachers trotting through objectives without thinking about whether these are relevant to children’s needs.”