The English Association published an interesting centenary pamphlet this week portentously titled: One Hundred Years of English Teaching: The Problems That Can't be Ignored. It contains three essays by teachers at Primary, Secondary and University level who all argue passionately for a change in the national curriculum; for a return to more creatively driven English teaching and a move away from all those government induced key stages and research assessment exercises.

There is an increasingly significant generation of alienated teenagers for whom any kind of English education is a complete turn off, and curiously it seems it's often boys (who develop reading more slowly than girls) who are failing at the first key stage reading tasks and by the age of seven are deemed in need of remedial teaching. Another child's self-confidence sacrificed to a bean counter who wants to be able to tick a box. One of the teachers who wrote the pamphlet, Geoff Barton, quotes Michael Barber's assertion that from the end of the second world war to 1997 standards of reading and writing in this country have not significantly improved. Which is a shameful thought, and if this divide between the real world and the national curriculum continues we will be in danger of failing a whole generation of children.

I taught a schools course recently at the Arvon Centre in Devon in which a bunch of pretty disadvantaged teens came for a week of creative writing in the countryside. Many of them had reading and writing issues, their spelling was poor, their articulacy was hyper and hyped up by a diet of fizzy drinks and sweets and their school had until recently been under 'special measures'. The kids weren't stupid, they were just distracted and disengaged.

By the second day they had been introduced to poems by Frank O'Hara, some writing about Vietnam by Tim O'Brien, and with the fridge empty of sweets and Coke and the shop a long walk away through a field of scary cows, had a laughter-filled two hour session writing poetry using no abstract nouns.

Teaching should be driven by a sense of what children need to know in order to equip them for life. A book of impenetrable poetry will end up being thrown around the schoolyard. Give the child a chance to write their own poetry and suddenly there is engagement and a crucial sense of empowerment, and because they now understand how to write a poem, the book of impenetrable poetry is suddenly interesting. It's not rocket science.

Teenagers are always at the forefront of creating language, using slang, secret codes, nicknames. They have an irrepressible urge to be creative - look at myspace or bebo or any of the social networking sites. They are creating images, poems, songs, stories and much of their socialising happens in instant messenger through the medium of text.

There has never been a greater need to engage children with language, their language, to allow them to claim some ownership over their own articulacy. Creative writing shouldn't and doesn't do away with traditional reading and interpretation based approaches, but it sits alongside them, as another, vital way into text.