When the Trust was set up 10 years ago, with the ambition of building a literate nation, literacy was not at the forefront of the political agenda. Undoubtedly it is today.

When the Trust started gathering information on literacy throughout the UK in 1993, the scene was remarkable for a range of isolated though often excellent initiatives. Today, there is much more understanding of the need to have a coordinated approach if we are to break into those areas that have been traditionally hard to reach, like the 24 per cent of the adult population who have difficulty with the literacy skills needed for everyday life.

So can any of this change be attributed to the Trust? That is for others to judge, but I do feel that the Trust has made a distinct contribution to today's changed literacy environment. It initiated pioneering approaches to community-wide and systemic partnerships for literacy by helping set up the Newcastle Literacy Collaborative in 1996, a community-wide approach to achieving sustainable improvements in literacy. This idea has since been taken up by many areas and I am currently working with Belfast City to support its city-wide holistic approach.

All the signs are that things are moving in the right direction. The Government is investing large sums in literacy and there is an increasing recognition that you can only make so much progress by focusing exclusively on what happens at school level. To reach the hard to reach we must also establish more effective school, parent and community partnerships. Such thinking is, of course, not new but there is now a greater understanding of the need to see the whole, and the relationships within the systems that impact on any individual's ability to maximise their opportunities. Scotland has established a community schools initiative, offering an integrated service through placing education, social work, health, psychology and other child professionals all under one roof. Encouragingly, the extended school approach is developing in England.

The Trust has consistently argued for a more holistic perspective. In 1996, we established Reading Is Fundamental, UK, promoting the fun of reading and the benefits of having books at home by providing opportunities for children to choose and keep new books. The National Year of Reading, born out of the launch of England's National Literacy Strategy in 1998, was a chance to put some further aspects of this thinking into practice. Hence our willingness to take on the running of the Year because it combined two things at the heart of the Trust's vision - that reading for pleasure must be part of the agenda if you are to build a truly literate nation, and that you have to look beyond the school to the whole community and unlock enthusiasm and resources for literacy in every aspect of society. The National Year of Reading brought all this together - an approach so popular that it was picked up and developed in different ways throughout the UK. Its influence has been sustained in a number of sectors - including, most obviously, the library service.

Many areas that perhaps once would not have seen literacy as their territory now appreciate how it can contribute to their agenda and how they, in turn, can contribute to raising literacy standards. Thus 25 different policy areas, ranging from health, housing, education, Sure Start and Connexions through to the voluntary sector and the probation service attended this year's regional meetings on literacy and social inclusion, as part of a Basic Skills Agency national support project delivered by the Trust.

Literacy can transform people's lives and the economic achievement of a country. We need to create a vision of what a highly literate nation can look like and work collaboratively, systematically and persistently to achieve this goal. The Trust can provide the oil that helps the parts of the machinery work together effectively by constantly raising issues about effective ways of working through networking, facilitating and disseminating good practice; all the things that the Trusts tries to do through its information website, a one-stop shop for all those interested in literacy, and its partnership initiatives. There is a role for an independent facilitator - asking the questions that help others clarify and deliver their objectives more effectively.

The Trust has always championed a national strategy for literacy: a whole community approach that starts at the ante natal stage, is inter-generational and has a community dimension that is flexible enough to respond to local conditions. It should begin around issues of language and play in a child's first three years. This is why Bookstart (initiated in 1992 by Booktrust), the world's first national programme to get books to babies, is so significant. The centrality of early years linguistic development to later literacy development lies behind our decision to set up Talk To Your Baby in 2003. This campaign is aimed at establishing a concerted national drive to raise the profile of the importance of early language, working through the media and those many organisations, like the health service and housing associations, that are central to people's lives. Parents who lack the confidence and the skills to contribute to their children's language development need to feel empowered to do so.

Most importantly we need to engage more men in all of this, hence the Trust's launch in September 2002 of Reading The Game, using our experience of how to use the influence of football to motivate people to read. All the power of popular culture will be unlocked to get the message across.

The maxim, 'It takes the whole village to raise a child' underpins the Trust's approach. If the community is at the heart of sustainable change in standards of literacy, then organisations have to work in partnership, focusing their activity not on their own profile but on maximising the effectiveness of the combined partnership. Real collaborative working creates a virtuous spiral.

There are no blinding lights on the road to world-class literacy - indeed such approaches can be counter-productive since they stop us from recognising the knock-on effects of initiatives in one area on other areas. Such absolute clarity also stops people from listening and being healthily tentative. What is needed is a climate where people will listen rather than preach, where we can hold productive dialogues, and can avoid the advocacy of views so strongly stated that other views cannot be heard. Everyone involved needs to know what they're trying to achieve but also recognise that the routes won't always be clear.

This is not to say that England's National Literacy Strategy was not needed. It was, and has much to be proud of, but it slightly over-claimed on what and how fast it could achieve and persisted with a top-down model for too long. The trouble is you can be so committed to your approach that you block out the intellectual openness that we need. It's not always 'clear' answers but a way of thinking that will help bring about the most effective change. For example, the Skills for Life adult basic skills strategy could be terrifically good if given the space and time to be so. But it mustn't be overdriven by potentially counter-productive targets.

So why is another 10 years enough? If the Trust is resourced to do its job properly, in 10 years' time we should have helped create the infrastructural and cultural changes that can sustain our new higher levels of literacy more effectively. It's all a question of helping provide the momentum for a way of working that continues without us - a snowball effect. The success of this way of working is to strengthen all contributions and to be self-effacing so as not to pose a threat to others - it's a question of not worrying about status or empire.

I am hopeful that so much has been built in the first 10 years that it can act as a springboard to move the broad literacy community forward for the next 10. This can happen as long as those engaged, while striving for the very best for all, remain visionary, enthusiastic, open-minded and non-competitive.

The momentum that is now developing can be built on to deliver world-class literacy standards. In 10 years time, the Trust could pull out because we would have helped create the culture that could move forward effectively without us.

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