GET LONDON READING CAMPAIGN

The Campaign to get London reading

The last time I was in London, I found myself reading an article on the Underground about how the Evening Standard has launched a major campaign aimed at tackling the illiteracy problem the capital is currently facing. They have joined forces with a unique charity called Volunteer Reading Help which has already been working with children to help transform their lives.

The charity works with schools and uses volunteers to read with children who are having trouble. All volunteers are trained to mentor school pupils who struggle to read & write.

It's quite cheap to fund costing 92 p a day to give a struggling child this kind of one-on-one volunteer help. Raising funds for the charity - and encouraging more Londoners to volunteer for it - is the immediate goal of Get London Reading.

It seems to be fairly obvious that one-to-one reading help for children can dramatically improve their skills. It is the norm in affluent households to be surrounded by books - but not for those less fortunate. And it's unfortunate that for too many children with reading difficulties, schools are unable to offer the sort of intensive individual help they need.

I couldn't believe it when I read that one in three children does not own a book and how one million working adults cannot read; that one in four children leaves primary school unable to read properly and that 1 million Londoners are functionally illiterate.

Now apart from the fact that I never would have imagined that a place like London would have to deal with such a 'crisis', I ask myself when did this all start happening.

For myself, growing up with a book was life at hand, I always had my head in a Roald Dahl book.

So what should London do – sack teachers, persecute non-reading parents, give free copies of books to all children??

In a recent study by the University of Nevada (a feasible survey that looked at 70, 000 children in 27 countries over 20 years), one of the likely predictor's of a child's educational success is the number of books at home. As few as 20 books make a huge difference, while a child brought up in a household with more than 500 books is likely to spend on average three years longer in education than a child from a home with no books. So the key doesn't have to be social class or race, nor wealth or parental educational levels: it's simply books.

And this can be achieved by using the schools. If every school in the land set itself the task of interesting whole families in books - through book-swaps, book fairs, reading competitions, anything - then books will get to those hard-to-reach homes.

What's surreal is that under British law, libraries are compulsory in prisons but not in schools. So many secondary schools don't have librarians and access to a wide range of books of all types.

Lobbying the government to make school libraries a statutory requirement springs to mind here!

To turn children who can just about read into readers takes more than time, it takes lifetimes: the lifetimes of storytellers of children's books like Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Aesop, Enid Blyton, JK Rowling and so many more, it's just finding the right way to get them into children's minds.