How do I get involved?

There are a number of ways you can get involved in Every Child A Reader. If you are a parent of a child with reading difficulties, work in education or are simply interested in helping all children become literate, you can talk to your local school, education authority, councillor or MP about the initiative and seek their support.

Any school can train its own Reading Recovery teacher, providing that the programme is available in your area and that you can fund the cost of a half-time teacher to work daily with your lowest achieving children in Year 1 and 2. To find out more, go to www.readingrecovery.org.uk.

Additional funding from the Every Child A Reader initiative is available through the local authority in some areas. Ten local authorities are involved in the first phase of the project: Brent, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith & Fulham, Southwark, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Middlesbrough and Sheffield. Schools in these areas have already been selected. These local authorities were targeted on the basis of numbers of children facing significant difficulties in literacy (the percentage of children attaining below Level 3 in English at the end of Key Stage 2), and their capacity to identify already-trained Reading Recovery teachers who were no longer practising and could be 're-activated' through the additional funding provided by the Every Child A Reader charitable trusts.

In the second phase of the initiative, nine local authorities were funded to train a person to lead Reading Recovery in their area: Barking and Dagenham, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Tower Hamlets, Bristol, Leicester City, Kent and Devon. The authorities invited to apply were those where there is considerable need and where there is no history of Reading Recovery, where it is no longer operational and where there is no other nearby source of training. The majority are in inner London or the major regional cities, but some areas of lower social deprivation have been included so as to test out delivery models that involve a trained Reading Recovery teacher serving a cluster of schools.

In September 2006, these local authorities each introduced Reading Recovery into a minimum of ten schools, with project funding provided to the schools for a two-year period. Funding was also provided to schools in Lambeth, Southwark, Leeds and Manchester, with training provided by neighbouring authorities.

Now Teacher Leaders have been trained for Kirklees, Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Swindon and Waltham Forest. In September 2007 they began to train Reading Recovery teachers in up to ten schools in their areas.