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Last month we launched our Life-Changing Literacy Big Give match funding campaign and we are delighted to announce we successfully reached and exceeded our campaign target of £50,000!

With the attainment gap the widest it has been for a decade, our work supporting children from disadvantaged backgrounds is needed now more than ever before. We can only do this though with the generous support of our funders and the hard work of the fundraising team here at the charity and that’s why we launched a Big Give Match Funding Campaign aiming to raise £50,000. From 5 March until 5 April, every pound donated through the Big Give platform, the donation was matched.

We have been overwhelmed by the incredible response to our campaign and would like to thank everyone who made a donation. Your generosity will help us to support even more children with our life-changing literacy work.

Thank you to everyone who supported our Life-Changing Literacy Big Give Campaign!

Find out more about why we launched this important campaign.

This month we have launched our Big Give match funding campaign. The campaign lasts for one month and for every pound donated through the Big Give platform up until 5 April, the donation will be matched until we reach our campaign target, helping us to support even more children with our life-changing literacy work.

Over the last five years, The Children’s Literacy Charity has gone from strength to strength and this year we will be working in over 40 partner schools, delivering our expert programmes to more than 1100 children.

However, we remember only too well that five years ago, in March 2020, schools across the country closed at the start of the Covid pandemic. While children, families and all those involved in education have worked hard to make up for lost time, sadly, the impact of lockdowns and missed schooling is still being felt today. A 2023 Centre for Social Justice report showed that 57% of children from disadvantaged backgrounds are leaving primary school without the necessary literacy skills.

In response to the increased need for specialist literacy support, in 2021 we launched Reading Lab, our 1:3, 10-week catch up programme for older pupils and in 2022 started delivering a 1:3 Literacy Lab option, to help schools support more younger primary school children needing extra help. Both interventions have remarkable outcomes in closing the literacy gap and our goal is to help as many children as we can who need our expert support, giving them the opportunity to engage with learning, grow in confidence and realise their full potential.

One Donation, Twice the Impact!

To mark the achievements of our charity over the last 5 years, as well as celebrate our partnership with schools and funders on 5 March we launched our Big Give Match Funding ‘Life-Changing Literacy’ Campaign. The campaign runs until 5 April and for every pound you donate through the Big Give platform, the donation will be matched!

With the attainment gap the widest it has been for a decade, our work supporting children from disadvantaged backgrounds is needed now more than ever before. We can only do this though with the generous support of our funders and the hard work of the fundraising team here at the charity and that’s why we are running a Big Give Match Funding Campaign aiming to raise £50,000.

Big Give Campaign – Donate Here

Do please share the news of our campaign with friends, family and colleagues and follow us on social media for updates.

National Storytelling Week celebrates the power of telling stories and this year’s theme, ‘Reimagine Your World’, encouraged creativity and exploration.

February in our Literacy Labs kicked off with an immersive journey into storytelling!

The children who attend our Literacy Lab sessions had the opportunity to celebrate the week and enjoy a variety of storytelling activities. Our tutors were equipped with a diverse set of books and resources—including story dice, story maps, and images of portals and extraordinary doors—to spark imagination and inspire storytelling.

With the guidance of our creative tutors, children brought their stories to life in various ways. They crafted story boxes, designed zig-zag books, used puppets to narrate their tales, and wrote their own original stories!

In our Literacy and Reading Labs we are passionate about promoting reading for pleasure. As well as building literacy skills through our expert and tailored tuition, we also want children to experience the joy that can come from reading, whether it’s being swept up in a story or marvelling over mind-boggling facts. National Storytelling Week is a great opportunity to immerse children into the wonderful world of books.

We’ve had so much fun celebrating National Storytelling Week and we’re thrilled to share some of the highlights with you!

The Children’s Literacy Charity recently teamed up with Fun & Active Playgrounds to offer our partner schools the chance to win a free educational and literacy-themed playground marking.

Our competition opened early September and partner schools were invited to enter the prize draw to win one of four eye-catching playground markings to support phonics.  Research shows outdoor learning can support confidence,  helping children to develop socially as well as improving physical skills.

Julie Taylor, Education Lead, commented: “We are strong advocates for outdoor learning and think having literacy-themed playground markings  is a great way to support the work we do in helping children with their literacy skills.”

The wining school’s name was drawn on 17 October and …..the winner is: Harlesden Primary School in Brent!

Sarah Wawn, Headteacher at Harlesden Primary School was delighted: “This is fantastic news! The team are very excited to see the design in our playground and are looking forward to seeing the positive impact it has on our children.”

Fun & Active Playgrounds said: “We are really looking forward to installing the literacy playground marking at Harlesden Primary School. Creating an inspiring space that will enhance the playground experience for all the pupils. Congratulations Harlesden Primary!”

The charity’s expert tutor Juliet has been delivering our Reading Lab intervention at Harlesden school for a number of years now, helping children to catch up with their literacy.  For Key Stage 2 children, Reading Lab is a 10-week catch-up programme focussed on reading fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. Both our Literacy and Reading Lab programmes are designed to foster a love of reading and boost confidence, self-esteem and resilience, enabling pupils to engage effectively and enthusiastically in the classroom.

Watch the winning school being announced!

Congratulations to Harlesden Primary School who will get to choose one these eye-catching playground markings for their pupils to enjoy:

Phonics Pond 

Phonics Flower Bed

Phonics Train

Phonics Snake

The Children’s Literacy Charity has produced a ‘Book Buzz’ summer learning pack to help keep literacy skills alive over the long Summer holidays. The activity pack is now available online!

This year, the charity has created a summer activity pack which was distributed by our tutors to all Literacy Lab children and is now up on our website too.

The pack was designed to help avoid the ‘summer slide’: a well-documented phenomenon when due to the length of the summer holidays, some children lose valuable literacy and learning skills.  Sadly, learning loss is most pronounced among children from disadvantaged backgrounds due to a range of factors, including limited access to books and educational resources and fewer opportunities for enrichment activities.

Our ‘Book Buzz’ summer pack has lots of fun literacy ideas linked to stories available online. Children will need to access one story for every week of the holiday and can then complete activities which include drawing, talking, making and writing, either independently or families can join in and enjoy sharing stories.  Happy Reading!

View and download the Book Buzz Summer Learning Pack

More on Helping Your Child At Home

Providing an enriching language and literacy experience is a crucial element if children are to develop as independent and motivated readers. In this blog our Education Lead, Julie Taylor explains that for children struggling with reading, context and comprehension and reading enjoyment are as important as the process of decoding.

In my blog post last year on phonics,(Beyond Phonics: Why children need to enjoy reading – The Children’s Literacy Charity (thechildrensliteracycharity.org.uk) I argued that while the rigour of phonics has improved reading standards overall, phonics teaching alone is not always enough to produce confident, resilient readers, whatever their background.

However, for children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, providing them with an enriching language and literacy experience is a crucial element if they are to develop as independent and motivated readers. For children struggling with reading, context and comprehension and reading enjoyment are as important as the process of decoding.

It is this holistic approach to the acquisition of reading skills that is highlighted in an excellent new book: The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to teaching Phonics, Reading, Writing  by Charlotte Hacking (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education) and Dominic Wyse (Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education, UCL).  We have long admired the work of the CLPE and regard their resources as integral to the reading process.

As soon as children enter the Reception doors, the daily phonics lesson is now an established and predictable part of their routine.  

Yet while last year’s PIRL (Progress in International Reading Literacy) Study showed that our children are now the ‘best readers in the western world’, DfE data for 2023 indicates that over a fifth (21%) of children did not meet the expected standard in the phonics screening test at the end of Key Stage One and nearly a third (32%) of children did not meet the expected standard in reading. The PIRL data also reveals that England is 42^nd out of 65 countries in terms of reading motivation.  It is this statistic which should concentrate minds on the need to take a more holistic approach to the acquisition of literacy skills.

As a specialist literacy intervention, we understand only too well the importance of effective phonics instruction in teaching pupils the relationship between sounds and the letters that represent those sounds and to understand the alphabetic principle.

It is not up for debate that phonics is a crucial component of reading instruction but it is not the only approach, nor is it universally the best way for every learner. Different children have different learning styles and needs, so a more holistic approach that includes phonics instruction alongside other wider word recognition strategies such as whole language, sight words, context clues, and comprehension skills is important.

Teaching the key reading skills using the formulaic, phonetically decodable books will of course provide opportunities to practice a child’s knowledge of sounds but we must not forget the role real books can play in providing context and contributing to comprehension.

For our youngest children, daily immersion in ‘real’ books, alongside phonics instruction, not only provides opportunities for children to read, apply their phonics skills and decode but also helps to develop comprehension and a love of books which will cement the foundations of a lifelong love of reading. As teachers, we have a responsibility to ensure that children develop the knowledge and skills to read with increased fluency which will lead to a greater depth of comprehension which in turn will increase reading motivation.

The approach taken in ‘The Balancing Act’ focuses on using high quality children’s texts to teach the key elements that are vital to learn to read and write, including phonics.

As the authors rightly argue: “With this approach, the importance of comprehending and composing the meaning of written language is carefully balanced with the acquisition of a range of skills and knowledge. This enables pupils to see the real purposes for reading and writing.”

“Meaning drives our approach to teaching reading and writing. It is the essence of human language, hence it should be the essence of teaching. Teaching about sounds is meaningless unless it is contextualized in words, sentences and whole texts.”

In both our Literacy and Reading Labs we take just such a balanced approach to the acquisition of literacy skills.  Reading fluency is an essential component of our sessions: children learn and practice phonics and apply their skills in all contexts. Using a variety of techniques, children are taught how to make reading more meaningful and enjoyable and an exposure to high quality, diverse texts provides the engagement that will lead to under served children acquiring the literacy skills essential to be able to engage right across the curriculum.

Over our many years of experience in supporting children who are significantly behind in their reading, it is the both the depth of our phonics tuition combined with the richness of our language and literacy environment which makes a difference, enabling us to close the literacy gap and broaden horizons.

Find out more about our Literacy and Reading Labs in primary schools.

What is so special about a bedtime story? In this latest blog, our Education Lead, Julie Taylor discusses why reading to a child at bedtime can help children through those early years of primary school, fostering not only the joy of reading but building those essential early literacy skills.

“The routine of reading at bedtime offers a slow wind-down at the end of a busy day. It creates a reading environment that allows both adult and child those precious moments to get cosy and slip into the magical world of books. Shared reading is not only fun, it is also a wholly worthwhile activity reaping great reward as a child travels through those formative years. An investment of a few minutes a day has the power to create a lifelong love of books and reading.

Reading aloud to children is the first key stage in their journey to becoming independent readers.

For children, listening to simple stories with patterns and rhymes prepares them for the words that they eventually meet in print, and for the music of language. These simple stories help develop a knowledge of how texts are constructed so that they can begin to invent and build their own stories as they grow. Reading aloud to children is the first key stage in their journey to becoming independent readers.

Discovering the joy of books at an early age has numerous benefits that parents may not have considered.  Sharing a bedtime book is undoubtedly a bonding time but it is also building those firm foundations of literacy.  Not only do books stimulate and empower a child’s imagination, they also improve language and listening skills, facilitating important conversations that develop vocabulary, thinking skills and encourage children to offer their opinion. They learn to question, to predict, to hypothesise, to explain and describe: all language skills they will use across the curriculum as they grow.

Reading a bedtime story to a child offers comfort and reassurance. It is relaxing and soothing, providing the security that a young child needs in a nurturing and safe environment. An adult’s time and attention that a bedtime story demands is a priceless gift to a young child, providing that calming rhythm and pace that a child needs at the end of the day. Delivering that bedtime story tells our children that they matter. It is not only our time and energy that is so precious to them but their immersion into books which plays such a great part in the development of their literacy skills.

Research suggests that just twenty minutes of reading to your child each day contributes to an improved performance in school.

Even for those parents and carers who have their own challenges with reading, perhaps dyslexia or English is not their first language, there are still so many opportunities on the page. Discuss the pictures in your home language, tell the story using your own words, discuss with your child. A bedtime story is so much more than reading a story, it’s an activity that everyone can share and enjoy.

Research suggests that just twenty minutes of reading to your child each day contributes to an improved performance in school. As children hear the words and comprehend the stories and illustrations, vital connections in the brain are made. When stimulated these connections form the basis of their future learning and intellectual engagement. Regular reading will also help to improve a child’s ability to sustain longer periods of concentration, improve their sleeping patterns and develop greater self-esteem. Books provide an understanding of the world, develop empathy and activate a child’s imagination, propelling them through those early years of primary school, fostering not only the joy of reading but building those essential early literacy skills.”

More information on helping your child at home.

The Children’s Laureate, Joseph Coelho has recorded a special video message for our Literacy Lab pupils in recognition of their amazing work inspired by the book Our Tower.

This year Literacy Lab pupils enjoyed reading the book Our Tower and created their own work inspired by the story. Written by Joseph Coelho and wonderfully illustrated by Richard Johnson, our tutors enjoyed sharing the book with the children and introduced a variety of activities including character profiles and descriptions inspired by the story. They explored positive and negative vocabulary and drew maps and their own designs of a tree-grown man character depicted in the book. Children also created wonderful literacy paperchains, linking elements of the story together.

We were all so excited to receive this special video message. Thank you Joseph Coelho!

Read more about the activities inspired by the book Our Tower on World Book Day 2023.