Claire Tomalin, a leading academic and biographer of Charles Dickens, has claimed that today’s education system fails to equip students to read the novels of the great author.

In an interview with the Press Association to mark the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth, Tomalin hit out at UK schools, saying that they do not teach children to read with the attention span necessary to tackle long and complex novels like those written by Dickens. Instead, she claimed today’s children are being brought up on a constant diet of television programs, which is detrimental to their academic development.

The suggestion that UK schools, education and UK essays are declining in academic quality has been met with anger by teachers and children’s authors, some of whom have come forward to defend the English syllabus for its inventive exploration of classic works.

It was also pointed out that in celebration of the 200th anniversary, the City Council of Portsmouth, Dickens’ birthplace, has provided every secondary school in the city with a full collection of the author’s works.

But recent figures show that only 58% of pupils nationally achieve 5 good GCSEs which suggest a worrying lack of the most basic abilities such as reading and writing essays. It is possible that Tomalin’s assessment of a decline in students’ ability is more realistic than Brits would like to admit.

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