Improving reading through a big society

Originally published @ 9:52 am, Mon 25th Oct 2010

It’s says something for the ambition for our children that in a city where our pass rates at GCSE have soared, and the gap in reading at Key Stage 1 has closed from 6 points with the rest of England to 3, that the reaction of Nottingham Portfolio Holder for Children’s Services (and former Primary Headteacher) Dave Mellen to a recent drop of 1% (arguably easily explicable within the context of cohort differences and teaching assessment methods) is to require a refreshed focus and drive for improvement.

As scrutiny chair, I had the pleasure of being invited to a new focus group where it became apparent that libraries were already working hard at making reading more popular and there are well established schemes to encourage volunteers to read.

So the big society already exists. And an instinctive approach to seeking further improvement is to see whether it can be made bigger.

Challenging, I think, in a time of cuts to resources that often support the voluntary and community sector, to ask the sector to do more. Certainly challenging to ask heads of HR departments in public and private sectors, to mobilise more volunteers when they’re almost certainly handling reductions and redundancies.