“The first lesson is biology. What has poo got to do with football?” Ben Lyttleton, the co-author of the popular book series Football School, is pointing to a corresponding image on a screen in front of Year 7 pupils at the Stanway School in Essex.

Hands shoot up but not before someone shouts out: “Tottenham!” It’s not the answer Lyttleton, a Spurs fan, is looking for – but he smiles before pressing on with his lesson, Football School-style. Lyttleton and his best friend Alex Bellos wrote the fact-packed books to get through to children who might prefer playing football to reading.

“You have to eat to play football, and before you do football you have to do a poo, because you don’t want to do one on the pitch,” Lyttleton tells the school children. He clicks to a shot of Gary Lineker. “Lineker pooed on the pitch. He wasn’t well and hadn’t eaten the right kind of food.”

Boys are struggling with reading

Like many secondary school teachers, Jones worries that boys aged between 11 and 14 in particular can struggle with reading. The most recent Sats tests – the national assessments taken by Year 6 pupils – show that just 60 per cent of boys reached the expected standards in maths, reading and writing – compared with 70 per cent of girls. And it’s getting worse for boys, with the proportion reaching the expected standard in reading dipping to 69 per cent in 2019 from 72 per cent the previous year.

“Books compete with the Xbox and similar things where they’re getting entertainment instantly,” says Jones. “The Football School books are about showing pupils you can have the same level of enjoyment from reading.”

“Football School is education by stealth,” adds Lyttleton, explaining the idea behind the series, which runs to seven books and teaches children about the world through football facts and stories filtered by curriculum subject.

Football clubs help them to ferret out fresh snippets. “We find we get better access when we tell them we’re writing for kids because they appreciate what we are trying to do.”

Football as an arena for learning

In the assembly, geography and culture follow the biology lesson. Lyttleton, who is clutching a football, argues that Brazil’s flair for the sport is down to its climate and penchant for samba. “Many Brazilians learn to play football on the beach, and if you can master that then you can be brilliant playing on a nice flat surface. Plus, when Brazilians are dribbling, they’re essentially dancing the samba, because samba involves wiggling your hips a lot and keeping your upper body very still.”

Lyttleton even tries to make pupils feel better about getting their homework back marked with red pen by showing them a proof from a book covered in red and green markings.

“That showed to me my editor had read every single word and was trying to make it better. So whenever you get a piece of work back with all these markings… feel happy because your teachers are helping you.”

The power of author visits

Research shows that getting authors to visit pays off for schools, helping to boost reading levels, confidence and enjoyment. A recent report by the National Literacy Trust found that twice as many young people could read above the expected level for their age at schools which invited authors to visit, compared with peers at schools that didn’t bother.

Lyttleton, who reckons he visits up to 50 schools a year, is back at Stanway, where he spends the rest of the day talking philosophy with small groups. “In ancient Greece and Rome, philosophers were thinking about big questions, about how we live our lives. The reason this is a Football School lesson is because football clubs have a philosophy,” Lyttleton tells them. “Liverpool is a very community-minded club. ‘You’ll never walk alone’ is their motto. That’s their philosophy.”

Winning over the crowd

Jones uses the Football School series in the school’s reading interventions, where a small group reads with an adult. In one Year 8 group, one boy’s reading age jumped more than two years in six months.

And another fan, Felix Joliot, discovered Football School after Lyttleton visited his school, Corpus Christi in Brixton, south London. His mother, Amelia, says he used to prefer kicking a football to picking up a book.

“Ben came to talk to Felix’s school a week before his ninth birthday, and when he counted his birthday money [we] bought every Football School book.”

Felix says the books make him laugh and think at the same time, while giving him facts. Back of the net for Lyttleton and Bellos.