Funding for the national roll-out of “Every Child a Reader” will be made available over three years from 2008-09. We are exploring the most effective ways of helping children who will benefit most from intensive literacy support. We are discussing with “Every Child a Reader” partners how we can reach the greatest number of children. I am pleased to confirm that we have invited Nottingham to take part in the third and final year of the pilot this year.
The reading recovery programme, “Every Child a Reader”, is a welcome development, and I thank my right hon. Friend and his team, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for introducing it. In a constituency and city such as mine, one in eight youngsters cannot read their first lesson at secondary school, so there is still a great deal of work to do. What can my right hon. Friend do, first, to train reading recovery co-ordinators effectively, and secondly, to roll out a programme to train teachers so that they can begin to expand the reading recovery programme to ensure that all our young people can read properly?
My hon. Friend has been a champion of the education cause in Nottingham. Matters have improved to a huge degree, but there is still an awful lot that we have to tackle. We have placed Nottingham in this project because it is designed specifically for the kinds of problems that he experiences there, as do I in the city that I represent, Hull. This is a partnership with the KPMG Foundation aimed at getting to children in their first year at school to ensure that they have the best possible foundation and that, later on, they do not need the kind of remedial and catch-up attention that gets more difficult the older the child gets. From this September, my hon. Friend will see the implementation of the “Every Child a Reader” policy, which includes the part-funding of a project leader, followed by its rolling out to 20 specialised teachers in 20 schools in Nottingham. Thereafter, it will be rolled out nationally. I undertake to keep a personal eye on how it is going in my hon. Friend’s constituency.