Reading Matters is a charity that is improving secondary pupils' reading skills through its mentoring scheme. Chief executive Angela Monaghan explains.

During this academic year, around 1,500 secondary school pupils will receive one-to-one support with their reading skills through the work of Reading Matters. Formed in 1997, Reading Matters (formerly known as Reading Matters for Life) is a small, but growing, charity that trains, places and supports volunteer Reading Mentors to work primarily in secondary schools across 10 local education authority areas in Yorkshire, Lancashire and the West Midlands.

Volunteers, recruited from the general public and local employers, undergo an intensive, two-day training programme (accredited by the Open College Network) before being placed with a local secondary school. Their pupil partners, who are selected by the schools, are typically three years behind their expected reading age and may also have difficulties with self-confidence, motivation and general attitude. Each volunteer works with two pupils each term and spends two half-hour sessions a week with each.

A July 2004 evaluation by Leeds Metropolitan University, covering 146 children, showed an average gain of eight months in reading age from a 10-week intervention. However, particular groups seem to do better - for example, Year 8 pupils saw an average gain of 11 months; Pakistani and Caribbean pupils saw average gains of 14 and 16 months respectively; and children identified as having special educational needs had average gains of 13 months in reading age.

The evaluation also found that teachers and volunteers had recorded, on average, "significant improvements" in reading performance, attitude to reading, confidence and self-esteem, speech and language, motivation, and general achievement. For more details see the full report on the NLT website at www.literacytrust.org.uk/links/volunteering.html#matters

Working from this successful base, Reading Matters has begun to broaden its work in the last couple of years, including:

• work with parents in Sheffield through a Parents as Partners programme
• support for Looked After Children in Leeds - a bigger pilot scheme will operate later this year in Leeds and Birmingham
• literacy support for children during transition from primary to secondary school - this work is now developing in Bradford, Calderdale, Leeds, Sheffield and Wakefield
  
• training key stage 4 students to provide reading support to key stage 3 pupils - sometimes known as "reading recovery by stealth".

This latter strand of work specifically targets key stage 4 students who themselves have difficulty with reading and are struggling academically. The students spend a term working with a volunteer Reading Mentor to improve their own reading skills, at the end of which they attend a half-day workshop in paired reading. The next term, they are paired with Year 7 pupils, with whom they read once a week during their lunch hour.

Since 2001, Reading Matters has trained around 200 key stage 4 students in paired reading. In the vast majority of cases, the schools have reported improved self-esteem, confidence and attitude to reading and, in some cases, improved attendance as they took responsibility for reading support to a Year 7 pupil. All key stage 4 students who worked with a volunteer prior to the paired reading course also improved their accuracy and speed of reading for meaning, scanning skills and vocabulary, which was a boost for GCSE preparation work. Year 7 pupils were also felt to have improved basic reading skills and confidence and the mentoring role played by the older students helped the Year 7 pupils settle into the senior school.

All the schools that have taken part in this work report positive outcomes and feel the effects have played a significant role in their whole school literacy strategy.

In spite of the success of this programme, it is often difficult to persuade schools to select key stage 4 pupils who are struggling rather than their Gifted and Talented pupils; schools are also reluctant to release pupils in the run-up to GCSEs. Success, as is always the case, rests a great deal on a successful partnership between the school and Reading Matters.

Reading Matters charges schools for each volunteer Reading Mentor - currently £180 per term - and for a minority of schools this can be a problem. Where appropriate, Reading Matters seeks external funding from a range of sources - both statutory and charitable - to support volunteers in some schools and it is almost always the case that schools would like more volunteers than they can afford to pay for.

The Reading Matters approach can be very effective in complementing other interventions in schools and so fits well within a policy framework that promotes personalised learning and where "every child matters".

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