At quarter past two every afternoon, Kestrel Primary goes quiet. Four hundred children, their teachers, the caretaker and the two women in the office stop what they are doing and read a book. Any book, as long as it is made of paper.

The school dropped written homework for its younger classes last September and gave the time back to the school day. The reading hour is in fact forty minutes, which the head teacher, Femi Adeyemi, says is the longest a seven-year-old can sit still "without a crisis".

What changed

The school measures reading every term, as all schools do. In the year since the change, the share of seven-year-olds reading at the expected level has risen from 61 to 74 percent. Mr Adeyemi is careful not to claim it is all the reading hour. "We also bought a lot of books," he said.

Parents are mostly in favour. A few miss the homework. "It was the only time I knew what she was doing at school," said one father at the gate. His daughter, who is eight, said she was reading a book about a horse and would rather not be interrupted.