'I am not clever, they are cleverer than us': children reading in the primary school

This paper examines the experiences of children learning to read in a multi-ethnic London primary school. The data are drawn from doctoral research, based on ethnographic fieldwork, with children aged six to seven years and ten to eleven years. Reading is revealed as a strongly emotional realm for children. The children are weak to resist teacher assessment of themselves, but nonetheless seek to create consoling narratives against what they perceive to be the negative identity of ‘poor reader’. The data are distinctive, as resistance to school hierarchies and strong feelings about educational failure are manifested in the narratives of children as young as six years old.