Children's reading school faces axe

A charity that helps some of London's poorest children learn to read is facing the threat of closure unless a fund-raising drive is successful.

Real Action said today that it needs to raise £30,000 by the end of the month and then find about £250,000 annually to maintain its Butterfly Saturday Reading school for five- to 12-year-olds in west London.

Katie Ivens, the charity's co-founder and education director, said that children who completed the course improved their reading age by an average of 13 months.

Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove said: "The Butterfly Reading Group's excellent results working with children from a range of backgrounds and nationalities shows how, with innovative teaching methods, tangible improvements in our children's education can be achieved."

At the school, volunteers - mainly professionals from various walks of life - are trained to teach reading using a version of the backtobasics method known as synthetic phonics developed by educationalist Irina Tyk.

Although Real Action does not advertise, word of mouth ensures its classes, which have been running for a decade, are always full.

Many pupils come from the Mozart Estate in Queen's Park, where child poverty levels are among the highest in Britain.

There are also sessions for teenagers and adults whose literacy skills are low.

Ms Ivens said the charity relied on donations to keep the cost of the classes as low as possible. Currently, parents are charged £5 per session for five- to 12-year-olds and she said that many of the most needy found even this amount difficult to pay.

She added: "My concern is children will fall away because their parents can't afford it."

The Government has made synthetic phonics mandatory in primary schools but many teachers still baulk at teaching reading this way because it is seen as mechanistic and boring.

Ms Ivens admitted her favoured method seemed "austere" but cited the huge demand for the Saturday school as evidence that many children were being failed by the state system.

"We still get children coming to us aged 10 who are three, four or five years behind," she said.