Intensive support for struggling readers is worth the investment, argues Julia Douëtil, Reading Recovery national coordinator at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Over the picture of a famous footballer, the caption declared "Reading is fun" but Steven's contemptuous look suggested that he thought it was anything but. Steven had struggled with reading since he first started school, and to him reading was as much fun as a daily trip to the dentist. Success and failure are powerful teachers.

Teaching children to be real readers is crucial; to value reading as an activity, to find pleasure in books of all kinds. But how can you love something that you cannot do? How can you lose yourself in a book if reading is a struggle? How can reading become a favourite activity if your experience of it is of embarrassment, humiliation or tedium? If learning to read is fraught with confusion and failure, the child is unlikely to become a real reader. If he or she does not learn to read easily, early and effectively, then even the most inspirational role models cannot make reading fun. Even those who learn to read eventually are unlikely to enjoy reading; it remains a mechanical tool, necessary to survive in a print-based world, rather than a meeting of minds with an author.

I recently interviewed children who, a year previously, had completed a Reading Recovery programme. Now aged eight, they talked about how much they enjoyed reading, how they loved to read at home - one child was reading Treasure Island with his Mum and loving it. But none of them commented on what it felt like to be a struggling reader. This puzzled me because these children had had reading problems. At the age of six they had been the poorest readers in their year group, unable to read the simplest text and heading for serious problems in their future education.

Then the penny dropped. Unlike Steven, these children had never considered themselves reading failures because their literacy problems had been solved before they realised they had a problem. Reading Recovery had stepped in early, before their difficulties could become entrenched, and the teaching had been precise and intensive, so that they learned quickly enough to catch up with their more-able classmates. Within a few weeks, all four children had begun to read independently and within a few months they had reached appropriate levels of literacy for their age. The result was not just that they could read, but that they enjoyed reading.

In Reading Recovery, teaching begins with what the child can do, however little, giving him or her a sense of growing control over the reading process. The teacher carefully selects tasks at the cutting edge of the child's learning, so that although they make rapid progress, it always feels easy. The daily half-hour lesson is centred on reading several little books and writing short stories. The aim is that the child never finds anything hard - challenging, yes, but there is a subtle difference between being challenged, when we feel confident that we can achieve, and being overwhelmed when we fear we can't. Children in Reading Recovery learn how to treat the new and unknown as puzzles to be solved, not problems to be feared. They learn to read fluently, trust their own judgement and think about what they are reading.

For children who do not learn to read easily, our challenge is to overcome their problems as quickly and completely as possible; Reading Recovery has shown that this can be achieved for almost every child. So what are the chances that our least able children will receive the Reading Recovery programme they need? In Northern Ireland the chances are good; the implementation there is supported by the Government, whose stated aim is to make it available in every primary school.

Elsewhere in the UK, it's a mixed picture. In England 2,225 Reading Recovery teachers have been trained, but only 350 are currently able to implement it. In primary schools beset with problems, first with teacher recruitment then with funding, our most vulnerable children have lost out. Reading Recovery suffers from the mistaken belief that it is an expensive luxury because it costs more than most teaching. Building roofs costs more than building walls; intensive care costs more than general nursing, but is that a reason to suppose we can do without them? Intensive intervention costs more because it deals with a complex problem: children at exceptional risk of failure. The long-term costs of literacy failure are huge and well documented, and 'cheap' alternatives are not cheap if they don't solve the problem. Reading Recovery costs around £1,500 per child - for the love of reading it's a small price to pay.

Subscribe to Literacy Today