Within these reports the Government provided some interesting ideas regarding the ongoing issues of child poverty and social mobility. In the report on child poverty it is said that a radical transformation of public services and the welfare system is required,

This includes addressing some of the most entrenched issues: educational failure; worklessness; family breakdown; severe debt; and health issues, such as alcohol and drug addiction.

Offering support to parents’ learning and skills is beneficial to children, illustrating that in order to help children, policies need to be put in place to help parents as well. This could come from publically funded Family Literacy and Numeracy programmes and Wider Family Learning programmes. Skills could be gained from GIR as our recent evaluation in Wigan proved, helping to deal with some of the issues Government wishes to tackle.

Both reports point to the importance of a positive home learning environment in combating the effects of child poverty:

Research has shown that the home learning environment is the most important factor in children’s cognitive and social and behavioural outcomes. In the early years, a strong home environment is characterised by activities such as talking and reading to children, singing songs and learning through simple activities and play. As children mature, discussions in the family are important for helping children to learn to make good choices, as is reinforcing the importance of doing homework.

It is satisfying for everyone at The Reader Organisation to see official Government reports agreeing that reading aloud can have profound effects, in this case with children. The Reader has plenty of ongoing experience of reading with children, working in schools and with looked after children to great effect.

It will be interesting to see how the Government encourages a strong home learning environment, hopefully leading to more people reading aloud for their children and in turn improving social mobility and reducing child poverty.

Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education is leading the way in a push to raise national literacy levels after a report last December found that reading standards in teenager in Britain had fallen from 17th to 25th in the international league table. In the news today, Gove has said that he wants to ‘raise the bar’ in children’s education by requiring Secondary school age children to read 50 books a year, that’s one book every week!

Whilst it is an admirable target and fantastic to see that Gove has recognised the need to get more children reading more regularly, it is also something that would be seen as completely unattainable for most children. At The Reader Organisation we believe that it is a love of reading that is important and always quality, not quantity. We are completely behind Michael Gove in wanting to raise literacy standards in the children and young people of Britain but we believe that reading is a gift for life and does so much more for you than simply raise your literacy levels, we don’t want children to plough through book after book; we want them to read.

Whilst regular enforced reading may well raise literacy levels in the short term, all of the other benefits of reading great books would be lost amidst a race to finish a book and move on to the next one. This racing to finish books is already evident in many of the children that I work with, and it takes a long time to change their concept of reading, moving it from, “I must read this many pages a night”, to, “I’ll read this book because I enjoy it and I want to keep reading”, and it is only when this changes that the real benefits of shared reading can be felt. And what about the children who don’t read, who have never read and are filled with horror at the thought of having to read one book a year, never mind 50 books, how would this affect them?

I have read weekly with one young girl for a period of three years, and throughout the first two years of us working together she refused to be persuaded to read an entire book, we read plenty of poetry together but the concentration and commitment needed to stick with a novel just wasn’t there. We read the first few chapters of many novels together but she would always want to stop and move on to something else after that. I felt that it was important to not force her to read as love of reading is something that cannot be forced. Instead we must give children the opportunity, space, and freedom to allow a love of reading to develop, and above all it should be personal choice. After two years of patience and continuing to work with this young girl, something changed and we read an entire novel together. Since then there has been no looking back, we have read three novels together, all of which she has enjoyed. In February half term I loaned a book to her that we had been reading, saying “just in case you’ve got some spare time, you could read a few chapters”, she replied by saying, “I’ll borrow it but I probably wont read it”. When I went back the following week she had finished the book, reading over 200 pages that week and she was full of enthusiasm for the story, telling me all that had happened and asking if she could read the last two chapters to me as they were really great. It is developing this passion for literature that will change the literacy standards of children and young people.



Jane Davis was at the Conservative Party Conference to speak at a seminar which was launching the Citizens University, an idea developed by the Young Foundation as a novel way of providing citizens with the skills and confidence they need to help others. It’s something that we were really keen to get involved in, so Jane spoke at the seminar about how TRO would offer short training courses to enable people to read aloud with others in their community. Jane said:

The Citizen’s University has the potential to change the way we all live, person by person; we’re delighted to be involved.

We lose more than 91 million working days a year to poor mental health, at a cost of £77 billion and its rising. At the same time levels of literacy are falling.

Reading aloud together develops good mental health, increases literacy, builds supportive communities and helps discover meaning: in workplaces, hospitals, dementia care homes, schools.

Later on that day, PM David Cameron mentioned the Citizens University in his speech:

Your country needs you. And today I want to tell you about the part we’ve all got to play, and the spirit that will take us through. It’s the spirit I saw in a group of NHS maternity nurses in my constituency who told me they wanted to form a co-op to use their own ideas and their nous to help new parents. It’s the spirit you see just down the road in Balsall Heath, where local residents’ street patrols have turned a no-go area into a place where people can once again feel safe. It’s the spirit that just today, has seen some of our leading social organisations come together to set up a new Citizen University, to help give people the skills they need to play a bigger part in society. It’s the spirit of activism, dynamism, people taking the initiative, working together to get things done.

More on our involvement with the Citizens University as the project develops.

It's huge outside. Why are we here?

It's huge inside. Why are we here?

Go on, have a guess…

Using poetry to make a stand against various political movements and to comment on the burning social issues of the day is not a new occurrence. Many of the most memorable poems in existence have become so due to their profoundly emotive descriptions of war, poverty and large-scale anguish. Yet in a climate that is apparently apathetic – or perhaps on the other hand makes too much noise about the most unimportant of things – activism of the literary kind could be mistakenly perceived as being on the wane, or as not making any impact at all. Because “poetry makes nothing happen”; didn’t one of the greatest contemporary poets, W.H. Auden, say just that? Well yes he did, but that quote is often misinterpreted and like much else, when removed from its context ceases to mean much itself. He used the line in In Memory of W.B. Yeats, a self explanatory tribute to an immensely politically minded poet who with his words actually did make a lot of things happen. It may be true that verse may not automatically transform the plans of the government or put an end to world wars. But, to attribute to Auden the full sense of his words, “it survives”, is “a way of happening, a mouth”. Surely that is a longer standing testament to its agency.

So in the spirit of poetic protests, here is a poem from the aforementioned W.B. Yeats taken from what is considered to be his most famous and most politically concerned work, The Tower. In actual fact this is a section from a longer poem, Meditations in Time of Civil War, which was not just a significantly political piece describing the effect of war on an individual trying to some extent to isolate themselves, but is the most personal representation of Yeats’ feelings and experience of his family background. Filled with metaphor and rich images, I find this a typical Yeats poem in that it is so evocative, especially in its darkly beautiful last stanza which also serves as a prophetic warning.

The Stare’s Nest By My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

A similar both sides  of the same feeling comes from reading William Blake’s poem ‘Infant joy’ alongside  his ‘Infant sorrow’.  Mr Field says in an interview in  the current issue of The Reader that mistakes, political, social, personal – come from not allowing complexity: ‘the heresies of all time are not the preaching of untruth; they are usually the preaching of a single truth without being buttressed by another truth.’  He’s right again, and I’m glad to say that  that buttressing one truth by another – sometimes diametrically opposed – is exactly what literature  does for us. No wonder reading, like breakfast, helps brain formation.

So we’re ready, Frank, when called to create reading for pleasure programmes for parents! Four years ago, Kerry Hughes, a young single parent who worked for The Reader Organisation put together a collection of readings for parents involved in our Get Into Reading project. Texts ranging from Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Before You Were Mine’ to Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (one of the best books about parent child relationships ever written, connecting bad parenting to bad business practice, too: you’d like it, Frank) and it’s not just English literature, either: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , Tolstoi’s Family Happiness , Theodore Roethke’s poem ‘My Papa’s Waltz’.

When are we going to realise that ‘literature’ is a technology for the  brain to brain, heart to heart transplant of useful human  information? Reading is an evolutionary tool, and great  books are there not for syllabi and exams, but for personal, human and social use. There are many great poems about parenthood/childhood. Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Toys’, is onesuch. You may need to translate  it out of  a Victorian Christian sensibility.  But it’s worth the effort involved in such translation.

The Toys

My little son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quite grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet.
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I will be sorry for their childishness.”

Coventry Patmore

One of my favourites, David Constantine’s poem ‘New Year Behind the Asylum’, featured in Kerry’s wonderful collection, and David Constantine won’t mind I’m sure that I’m going to reprint it here. He’s in the revolution, too.

New Year Behind the Asylum

There was the noise like when the men in droves
Are hurrying to the match only this noise was
Everybody hurrying to see the New Year in
In town under the clock but we, that once,

He said would I come our usual Saturday walk
And see it in out there in the open fields
Behind the asylum. Even on sunny days
How it troubled me more and more the nearer we got

And he went quiet and as if he was ashamed
For what he must always do, which was
Go and grip the bars of the iron gates and stand
Staring into the garden until they saw him.

They were like the animals, so glad and shy
Like overgrown children dressed in things
Handed down too big or small and they came in a crowd
And said hello with funny chunnering noises

And through the bars, looking so serious,
He put his empty hand out. But that night
We crept past quickly and only stopped
In the middle of the empty fields and there

While the clock in the square where the normal people stood
And all the clocks in England were striking twelve
We heard the rejoicings for the New Year
From works and churches and the big ships in the docks

So faint I wished we were hearing nothing at all
We were so far away in our black fields
I felt we might not ever get back again
Where the people were and it was warm, and then

Came up their sort of rejoicing out of the asylum,
Singing or sobbing I don’t know what it was
Like nothing on earth, their sort of welcoming in
Another New Year and it was only then

When the bells and the cheerful hooters couldn’t be heard
But only the inmates, only the poor mad people
Singing or sobbing their hearts out for the New Year
That he gripped me fast and kissed my hair

And held me in against him and clung on tight to me
Under a terrible number of bare stars
So far from town and the lights of house and home
And shut my ears against the big children crying

But listened himself, listened and listened
That one time. And I’ve thought since and now
He’s dead I’m sure that what he meant was this:
That I should know how much love would be needed.

David Constantine

I have to admit that in the past my own personal political interest wasn’t that high. Perspectives changed during my time at university, as I dabbled with certain political issues as part of my course and though I don’t profess now to be always super-interested, I’ve made it a mission to become more knowledgeable in order to make my vote that bit better informed rather than standing in a polling booth confronted with a voting slip and pencil and being so confused that I end up making an ‘eeny-meeny-miney-mo’ choice. Faced with the task of getting myself clued up, I went with my natural instinct – and that is to read. Read, read, read until my eyes close and my brain is swirling with words, phrases and sentences. And as is always the way, reading helped immensely. If anything was to hinder, it was not the act of reading but the act of trying to always comprehend what was being said. Another one of my instincts is to look at how words are used, pick them apart and consider in depth their connotations. When certain words are repeated continually in manifestos and speeches, you can’t help feeling somehow that they’ve become emptied of their meaning, much like when you say a word out loud so many times that it no longer sounds part of the English language but instead like some made-up, alien invention. Add in the seemingly inevitable rhetoric and polish, and simple words like ‘change’, ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ are transformed into point scoring weapons.

Considering this, it’s easy to get back to a feeling of disillusionment surrounding the whole political she-bang. But it’s vital that we cling onto a few fundamental ideals amidst everything. On the political side of things, the fact that every vote does indeed count and is greatly important. In terms of linguistics, words and the power they have, it is undeniable that they do possess a great deal of it. Words aren’t just empty vessels or colourless building blocks to be picked up and rearranged carelessly; when used with consideration, or even with little of it and more sheer abandon, they can move, inspire and describe the most complex of matters concisely and compellingly. This poem by Arthur O’ Shaughnessy brings all of these factors together, I feel. Those wonderful opening lines ‘We are the music-makers/And we are the dreamers of dreams’ give such an optimistic glow and indicate in a brilliant way the significance of not just individuals but of us all together; no matter how much we may do ourselves down and sometimes feel unheard of or unrepresented, it is reassuring to know that ‘we are the movers and shakers of the world for ever, it seems’. And while it does acknowledge the negatives as well as the positives – vastly unlike the collective political manifestos – it’s hard not to be buoyed by the stirring and deeply inspiring collection of words on offer here. However this all turns out, whatever allegiance you have, I think we all want to hope for the best and so should take heart from the poem’s closing lines: ‘For each age is a dream that is dying/Or one that is coming to birth’.

Ode

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-1881)

In the NY Times, the speech has been qu0ted:

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage … Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize–Schweitzer and King, Marshall and Mandela–my accomplishments are slight.

In addition to writing his own memoir, Obama has never been shy about sharing his literary recommendations or summer reading list.

Watch Geir Lundestad explain why the Nobel Committee chose Barack Obama for 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

This announcement follows the publication of Duffy’s first official poem as Laureate: ‘Politics’, which sees her join the government expenses row. You can view the poem here, or for more information on reactions to ‘Politics’ follow this link to the Guardian article.

The Festival brochure will be distributed across Merseyside and Lancashire from Monday 22nd June. More details will be available shortly, but for now visit the official website for more information.

Obama is, as you may know, a poetry fan. He stated on the campaign trail that:

no one should graduate from university without having read poetry.

Perfomers included:  slam poet Mayda Del Valle, from Obama’s hometown Chicago; hip-hop artist and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda; and the finalists from a youth poetry competition, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio and Joshua Brandon Bennett; actor James Earl Jones; jazz musician ELEW and Esperanza Spalding; novelist Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; and Ayelet Waldeman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.

This unique event combining poetry and jazz in very special surroundings can be viewed on the White House website.