This paper concerns an approach to raising literacy standards which is rather different from the prevailing orthodoxy the Rhyme and Ritual project. The project is run by the Hamilton Reading Project, which comprises a series of initiatives funded by the Hamilton Trust, an educational charity, and implemented in fifteen primary schools in a large and socio-economically deprived city area in southern England. It incorporates both a supposedly old-fashioned traditional notion that children can be supported in learning to read through approaching a text known off by heart (the phrase is important, since the text must not only be familiar but also pleasurable to the individual child) and also the currently valued approach of expanding and extending children's appropriation and use of elaborated language, particularly in relation to imaginative, descriptive and expressive writing. It is the former aspect of the Rhyme and Ritual project, namely the provision of short texts to be memorised by young children and then read from text only books (with decoration but no illustrations) that we believe is uncommon as the basis of an educational initiative with the overt aim of raising literacy standards. The article gives a detailed outline of this initiative, with its two-pronged and pincer approach, and also some indication of how it is succeeding.