Read Easy: helping adults learn to read
Did you know that over 2.4 million adults in the UK cannot read?
One quarter of children leave primary school unable to read to a satisfactory level which leads to poor literacy skills in adult life. Thankfully, Read Easy is an organisation that helps adults learn to read through one-to-one teaching from their dedicated and fully trained volunteers.
Learning to read helps adults to improve their chances of employment, enables them to read with their children and grandchildren, and complete everyday tasks such as paying bills, reading medicine labels and understanding cooking recipes. Using the Shannon Trust‘s five Turning Pages reading manuals, adults can learn at their own pace using a synthetic phonics approach. Synthetic phonics is a teaching method where words are separated into small units of sounds, called phonemes. Learners then connect these sounds to written letters, called graphemes, which helps them understand how to read new words.
Read Easy was founded in 2010 by a literacy tutor who was working in a prison at the time. Ginny Williams-Ellis was running the Shannon Trust’s prisoner-to-prisoner reading programme and saw the success that one-to-one literacy teaching had on adult learners. This led to the launch of Read Easy’s community programmes which see fully-trained volunteers teaching adults to read across the UK during two thirty-minute sessions a week at the learner’s own pace.
More recently, The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades spoke out in a BBC documentary about his journey learning to read with his Read Easy Reading Coach. Like Jay, many adults are too embarrassed or ashamed to come forward and ask for help, but once they do it can be the start of something life changing.
How can you help?
There are many ways you can get involved with Read Easy and help one of the two million adults who struggle with literacy.
- Donate or raise some money: as little as £10 can provide the resources needed to train up 2 new reading coaches.
- Train as a reading coach: if you can spare at least 1 hour a week you could coach an adult in your local area.
- Support Read Easy in another volunteer role: from Team Leader to Venue Organiser to Publicity Organiser, there are many roles awaiting support from dedicated volunteers.
For learn more, visit Read Easy and the Shannon Trust online.