Love Literacy: exclusive Q & A with Jonathan Douglas

February 16th 2016

  On Tuesday 19th April 2016, we'll be holding our Love Literacy event in Birmingham's Botanical Gardens. The event was launched to help inspire people and therefore improve literacy, through helpful workshops and presentations by inspirational speakers and authors. In honour of Love Literacy, we caught up with National Literacy Trust Director, Jonathan Douglas. 

Peters: From starting your career within libraries and education, and now as Director of the National Literacy Trust, what inspired you to follow this path?

Jonathan: A deep love of literature and reading, and a belief that the power of literacy can transform life chances. There's also a memory of falling in love with books at the age of 7, when I first read Alison Uttley’s “A Traveller in time”!

P: The National Literacy Trust is dedicated to transforming lives through improved literacy. Can you tell us a little more about how the charity achieves this aim?

J: The gap between the reading skills of poor and affluent children in the UK is the widest in Europe, with the exception of Romania. Child poverty is the secret shame of the UK. The NLT uses literacy as a way to tackle this. If every child learns to read and enjoys reading, their life chances are transformed. We focus our work on the children who are in the UK’s poorest communities with the lowest literacy levels. This is where we can make the most difference. We help them by working in partnership with schools, libraries, health and housing in these communities. We also want those commercial partners in these communities, to help make a difference; with McDonald's we have distributed 22 million free books to families over the past 3 years. With Boots Opticians, we have just launched a new campaign to reach the 1m children in primary schools whose reading is held back by undiagnosed eye sight issues.

P: We’re very excited to see you at our Love Literacy 2016 event. Can you give us a sneak preview of what you will be covering in your keynote talk?

J: Enjoying reading and writing is not a frothy extra to literacy skills, but a vital aspect of what it means to be literate. Research has shown that enjoyment drives attainment and it's also uniquely potent in powering social mobility. Promoting the enjoyment of reading and writing can change society and transform lives. But the children and young people who can most benefit from this are also the most likely to hold negative attitudes to literacy! So, what can we do about it? Who is best placed to engage and develop the intrinsic motivation to read and write? The answers are sometimes humbling and frequently surprising!

P: Why do you think literacy and reading is so important, for children especially?

J: There’s a biggie…! Where to start? Ultimately, I believe that every child can write their own future and fulfil their potential, but that without literacy, they will be left behind. The child who is left behind finds it harder and harder to catch-up, and many of them never do. The result is frequently lifelong disadvantage. This is the pattern of the social inequality which runs like a fault line through British society. This is not inevitable. Literacy and reading is the most powerful weapon we have in combatting this pattern. So ultimately, I believe that literacy and reading are important not simply because of my love for “The Traveller in Time”, but because they make society more equal, stronger, richer and happier.