The news that the first Harry Potter book had made it on to the A-level syllabus has prompted the inevitable sneering about dumbing-down. J K Rowling is, of course, no Charlotte Bronte and her school stories are no Jane Eyre.

But one thing she does have in common with Bronte is that she understands narrative drive and knows how to hook in a reader, especially a young reader. And surely reading should be about enjoyment and pleasure, not about toil and despair, as wading through something like a fat Dickens can be?

Kids have so many competing demands on their attention that as far as I'm concerned, anything that gets young people reading, and enjoying reading, has got to be a good thing.

Reading is a key to, well, everything. It's a gateway to knowledge. Books open your eyes to the beauty of language, to understanding other people and their lives and to travel. If young people find reading a set text enjoyable, then surely, the argument goes, they will read more books.

Of course, there's another side to this coin. A-level English teaches you to analyse a book critically - and what that means, I hope, is that students who will study the first Potter book next year will get a sense of why Rowling is not a great writer.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is actually one of the better books in the canon: it's short, punchy and the narrative rattles along. It doesn't get bogged down nor does it sag anywhere, as her later books do - a function, I suspect, of her growing fame and a growing unwillingness of her editors to mess with the star's golden words.

But Rowling is more an Enid Blyton than a Charlotte Bronte. Her vocabulary is limited, her plotting is linear, her character development is ponderous and two-dimensional. The boarding-school story trope is a well-worn one: Rowling is neither the first nor the most inventive author to play with it. She's been criticised for her dearth of non-white characters; and there aren't many shades of grey in her stories, which are clunky in their depiction of good and evil.

Sure, she's clever with her puns - I still like Diagon Alley, the road where wizards buy their equipment - and her detail can be enchanting. But in the final reckoning, she's more Jeffrey Archer, a good storyteller rather than a great writer. She's no Jane Austen, whose pin-sharp observations and elegant writing mean that her books have a relevance today that plays just as well on the screen as on the page. And she's definitely no Shakespeare: at a performance of Othello starring Ewan McGregor at the Donmar Warehouse recently, I watched a group of sixth-formers in the audience lose themselves in the plot and the language. Rowling will never achieve that.

On balance, though, the presence of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on the A-level syllabus is a good thing. Not only will it mean that students might actually enjoy at least some of their coursework, which in turn might help them to engage with other, greater works, it will - I hope - mean that they will also pick up an understanding that great literature is not necessarily the same as commercially successful books.