OPINION: ‘Ambition on its own has never taught anybody to read’, Kirstie Logan-Townshend on the children locked out of reading

The following is an opinion piece by Kirstie Logan-Townshend, founder of Kirstie Logan Communications and a Swansea-based strategic communications consultant, who is currently working on a national children’s literacy campaign. She previously worked on AI at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and holds a Masters degree in Terrorism, Organised Crime and Global Security. The views expressed are her own and do not represent the editorial position of Swansea Bay News. Swansea Bay News publishes OpEds from politicians and public figures across the political spectrum.

I kissed my three-year-old goodbye this morning while she slept, one hand still curled around a book about mermaid princesses. Then I got a taxi to Swansea station and headed to London to run a back-to-school campaign.

She cannot read a word of that book. She is three. She carries it because it makes her look clever, and because she has already caught the reading bug from watching her mother. She has worked out that books equal escape. She has not yet worked out why.

I have worked in children’s literacy for years, first with publishing clients, and now on a campaign I care about a great deal. Which brings me to the number keeping me awake. In England, one in four children leave primary school unable to read to the expected standard. Not struggling with Dickens. Unable to read well enough to follow the lessons waiting for them in September.

That is a national figure, but it lives in streets, and it lives in ours, from the east of the city to the far end of Gower.

The Welsh figures do not make comfortable reading. In the last round of PISA, Wales scored 466 in reading, the lowest of the four UK nations and the only one below the OECD average. The Institute for Fiscal Studies put it more bluntly than any of us would dare: the average pupil in Wales performs at the same level as the most disadvantaged children in England.

Statistics do not tell you what it is like to be locked out of reading, so let me.

Behind a figure like that is a boy in Hafod who has developed a repertoire. He knows to reach for his water bottle at the precise moment the reading group is called, which page to have open, and exactly how far into a paragraph he can get before somebody notices. He is eight, and already an expert in a subject nobody taught him: the management of other people’s expectations.

There is a girl in St Thomas who has worked out that if she reads slowly enough, an adult in a hurry will finish the sentence for her. It works beautifully for about four more years.

They are the next generation of this city, and they are already very good at hiding.

None of this is a failure of love. Their parents want them to read every bit as much as I want it for my daughter. What they do not have is the twenty minutes. Shifts that finish after bedtime, a second job, three other children, a bus that does not come. Wanting it has never been the problem. Time is the problem.

I presume you have read this far without any difficulty. I wish I could say the same, because behind the prose you are reading is a dyslexic and a master of concealment.

I have always had a complicated relationship with words. They move me, I move them, and we bicker about the rest. I have reordered these paragraphs perhaps twenty-eight times, and I will do it again this evening.

None of it stopped me graduating with a Master’s with Distinction in Terrorism and Global Security, or being taken on as a debut novelist by Curtis Brown Creative. The novel is still in a drawer somewhere. The difference is that my parents spotted the gap early, and I always had somebody to sit beside me while I got to the end of the sentence.

I still remember the first time I managed a long word aloud, after weeks of a teacher coaxing it out of me. I cannot remember the word. I will never forget her face.

That is the whole of it. That is the difference between a child who finds reading difficult and a child who is shut out of it entirely.

When nobody closes that gap, it does not close itself. In England, one in six adults, some 6.6 million people, may struggle to read a medicine packet, follow a bus timetable or fill in a job application. It begins in a primary classroom, quietly, decades before anybody notices.

I am watching for it in my own daughter. She is intensely creative, and I would not be surprised to find she is dyslexic too. I will be there when the gap opens.

She is also growing up somewhere that has made choices. Wales has universal free school meals for every primary pupil and a new curriculum built around how children actually learn. Swansea Council has put a record £240.4m into education and schools this year, alongside a £150m programme rebuilding schools across the city.

None of which teaches a single child to read. Buildings do not sit down beside an eight-year-old and wait while he gets to the end of a sentence. But it tells you where a city’s priorities are.

What strikes me most is how small the thing that works actually is. The charity I am working with sends trained volunteers into primary schools to sit with a child and listen to them read, week after week. Somebody with the time, and the patience not to jump in when a child gets stuck.

That is the entire mechanism. It is not a policy. It is not a programme. It requires nobody to be an expert in anything.

Ambition is critical, as this city is fond of telling itself, and it is true. But ambition on its own has never taught anybody to read. A helping hand is just as critical, and a great deal cheaper and can step in effectively to bridge the gap between a busy parent and a child struggling with reading. As a friend reminded me the other day, volunteers have always gone into Swansea schools to help children read, and I hope that long continues.

So I will finish where I began, with a small girl asleep in Uplands holding a book about mermaid princesses she cannot yet read.

She will read it, difficulty or no difficulty, because she has every advantage going, including two parents who are able to sit and listen to her read her first sentences, and a mother who knows exactly what it is like when the words will not sit still.

Kirstie Logan-Townshend is the founder of Kirstie Logan Communications, a Swansea-based strategic communications consultancy. If you would like to submit an OpEd for consideration by Swansea Bay News, please email editor@swanseabaynews.com.