Volunteer to help kids read!

Booktrust has been awarded funding by the Education Endowment Foundation to deliver a Literacy Catch-up project.

The project aims to promote children's enjoyment of books and encourage them to see reading as a pleasurable activity rather than a chore. Booktrust will be running a 3-tiered pilot project in Bradford, Hull and Leeds to help support children moving from primary to secondary school that have not reached their expected reading level in English.

The move from primary to secondary school is particularly important in the development of reading skills. The project will encourage reading for pleasure and help bring the experience, enjoyment and confidence of reading to all. It will take place following completion of Key Stage 2 (Year 6) from June to September 2013.

The project will encourage reading for pleasure by providing reading materials and volunteer support to children over the summer. We aim to work with 15 secondary schools, approximately 5 in each of Bradford, Hull and Leeds. The secondary schools will be asked to indicate their feeder primary schools and help Booktrust approach them to identify the children that will take part. Eligible children will be identified through teacher assessment as predicted not to reach level 4 in English in their end of Key Stage 2 SATS.

There will be three groups with three different approaches to the project, each supporting 300 children. The project will be a Randomised Control Trial, placing children into one of the three groups at random. The outcome of the different approaches will be robustly evaluated to assess their impact. The evaluation will be undertaken by Sheffield Hallam University and Queen's University Belfast.

Booktrust are looking for volunteers to help with this exciting new project. If you can help out for around 5 days over the summer, we would love to hear from you.

Go here to find out more about what's involved