What makes for a children's classic?

Dickens to CS Lewis, Harry Potter to Neil Gaiman ... how do you decide on the best books for children?
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Time to go through the wardrobe? The Chronicles of Narnia. Photograph: PR

Around our neighbourhood at the moment there are a lot of kids sitting exams. Inevitably, the conversation at the kitchen table has been turning to what they're reading. The recent award of the Newbery medal (a major prize) to Neil Gaiman for his children's page-turner The Graveyard Book makes this subject extra topical.

A straw poll of two 11-year-olds throws up these names: Jacqueline Wilson, Louis Sachar, Judy Blume, Melvin Burgess, Michael Morpurgo, Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz, Stephanie Meyer - and a hot debate about JK Rowling. Then someone mentions Anne Frank (see the excellent recent BBC TV adaptation) and all at once we're spinning off into a discussion of classics for kids.

In this arena, several urgent questions crop up. Firstly, how soon should children be introduced to Austen, and Dickens? Secondly, and related to that, when the moment comes to launch into a classic from the English literary tradition, where should they start? Thanks to Rowling, who comes out of another English tradition, we probably also have to consider what's to be done about CS Lewis, Tolkien and that quasi-Christian Oxonian tradition that's now out of fashion?

Obviously, the answer to the first question is that it should depend on the reading age of the child, and that the debut Austen or Dickens is bound to be highly subjective. So it's probably an impossible choice. Nonetheless, optimistically, I offer Pride and Prejudice (or Northanger Abbey) for Austen and The Tale of Two Cities (or A Christmas Carol) for Dickens. The answer to the last question, I think, is that JK Rowling fans, especially, should read Tolkien and Lewis, if only to learn something about the imaginative prehistory of Hogwarts.

Finally, I'd like to throw in, for good measure, some classic crime (Christie), classic adventure (Stevenson, Buchan), and great pre-contemporary children's classics such as Noel Streatfield (Ballet Shoes), Dodie Smith (I Capture The Castle), Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), EB White (Charlotte's Web) and Richard Adams (Watership Down).

This is not a blog about lists (truly!), more an invitation to reflect on what makes a good book for children, who are the children's literary greats, and (ideally) what the mix of new and old should be. One issue that arises must be story versus style. Can you have a children's classic that is a wonderful, and inspiring, piece of prose but which fails as a narrative? And vice versa: there are (no doubt) some enduring kids'-book masterpieces which, on closer examination, are atrociously written. And then there's the "Alice Conundrum": a book written and published for kids which really fails with most nine-year-olds, but continues to have a wonderfully vigorous afterlife with philosophers and logicians!