[Edling] Learning to Read at 51

[Francis M. Hult via Edling]

 Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51

Jay Blades, presenter of The Repair Shop, has decided it’s finally time to
learn to read. He has been told he has the reading age of an 11-year-old.
Throughout his life he has found ways of avoiding the written word, and
this film digs deep into how this has shaped him.

Blades left school with no qualifications and nothing to his name than a
reputation as a great fighter. Can he now, in mid-life, tackle what he
failed to learn the first time round?

He’s not alone in facing this issue. Research findings suggest that a
quarter of all children in England leave primary school, like Blades,
unable to read to the expected level. More than eight million adults in the
UK have poor literacy skills, and half of all prisoners either can’t read
or struggle to do so.

Using a system developed for use in prisons by the Shannon Trust, Jay
commits to learn to read with Read Easy, a charity whose volunteers do
one-to-one coaching. Along the way, he revisits key moments in his life
that were shaped by not being able to read: the ‘learner’ class at school,
the dead-end jobs he had to take because he had no qualifications, and not
being able to read his children bedtime stories. Daughter Zola is now 15,
and Jay wants to read her a story before she reaches adulthood on her next
birthday.

Following Jay over six months of learning, this intimate and revealing film
goes behind closed doors to see how he organizes his upholstery business
without the written word, manages on The Repair Shop without scripts and
struggles each day with his vowels and consonants as he tries to learn
phonics. We meet Jay’s girlfriend Lisa, his daughter Zola and his ‘adopted’
family who all help him with his reading challenge. Jay also meets school
pupils and adults who struggle with reading and writing, as he discovers
the human stories behind the nation’s literacy statistics.

Full story:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0013wcj/jay-blades-learning-to-read-at-51
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