This paper is about the interaction between policy and practice, and about how competing policies contributed to a paradoxical tension within that interaction in one school. Within a paradigm of educational renewal, the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) has initiated a number of policies designed to give schools autonomy in designing and implementing programmes to achieve optimal educational outcomes for its students. Among these are READ! Singapore, Teach Less, Learn More and the School Excellence Model. In this context, we review an MOE initiated Extensive Reading (ER) programme in one school. Despite such innovative policies, Dewey Secondary School's [The names of the school and individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.] pedagogical and literacy practices continue to be largely influenced by other dominant features of Singapore's and the school's own educational culture--an exam-oriented focus that prioritises outcome and skill-based pedagogy and the school's historical practice of restricting literacies. Competing policies as interpreted by the school and diverse stakeholders result in a morphed ER programme--an adaptation of a reading programme that reflects the programme intent overtly but one that collides at other times, and as a result, is pulled in different directions. The story is, thus, one of "policies of promise and practices of limit".