Bake Off finishes, mum flicks through the TV guide a
bit, turns back to Channel 4. “It’s Sandi’s new thing. There’s nothing else
on.” We’re looking at a man in a smart shirt, black waistcoat, no tie,
mid-thirties perhaps, being asked by Sandi Toksvig how to spell ‘clock’. He
stumbles through the letters, strain obvious on his face, a questioning tone of
voice making his struggle clear. “Well, you’ve inadvertently spelled ‘cock’, I don’t
know if you’re okay with that.”
It’s looking like some kind of naff reality TV: ‘watch these
fully grown adults fail at life!’ kind of thing. Clips of a team of eight
trying to read a recipe aloud, follow written instructions, and spell words
like ‘while’ and ‘child’ aloud – all unsuccessfully. These adults use fully
conversant English when speaking, with average vocabularies and no difficulties
in speech comprehension. I can’t quite work out why exactly these people,
double, triple my age, are getting excited by writing the word ‘tube’
correctly.
By this point, I’m about to reach for my headphones and
watch last week’s Gogglebox. The show seems a mixture of silly and
frustrating and to be honest, I’m tired, I’ve been reading all day, and I don’t
have the mental energy to watch other people try.
“Sorry mum, I just can’t watch this. Like… this can’t be
real. How could you be an adult and not be able to read?” This was said more in
a tone of dismay than genuine questioning, but she replies, “Well, I can believe
it. Some people just never learnt. If you don’t really get it by the end of
primary school, and no one helps in secondary school, then no one’s going to
teach you.”
I can’t quite grasp the show’s angle, but Toksvig’s tone makes
it clear that there are genuine, heartfelt intentions behind these scenes that
feel unfamiliar to me. Dyslexia and other learning difficulties had been
mentioned by this point, but the idea that reading and writing could still be
inaccessible skills to adults had never really crossed my mind before. The
remainder of The Write Offs showed me that it really should have crossed
my mind, and it has been occupying it a lot since.
Paul, 43, is currently talking about his new-born. “I just
don’t wanna [sic] be the guy who, when his kid comes home from school, at four
or five, and goes ‘Daddy, what does this mean?’, doesn’t have the answer.” He’s
shown trying to read a from a packet of nappies. “Er… it could be anything at
all.” Sandi tells us he has the reading and writing age of a seven-year-old.
The eight ‘learners’ are now reading from a script together.
It’s Paul’s turn, and he has visibly frozen up. This has happened many times so
far in the program, and his response to Toksvig’s question of whether he is
okay is not surprising either: “It’s kind of a bit scary.”
But the next few minutes shock me.
“I was an English and drama teacher. Three and a half years
ago I had a stroke, damaged the left-hand side of my brain, and now I can’t
read and write. It just changed everything really quickly, everything had gone
in a second.”
The camera pans to him attempting to read a line of
dialogue, squinting and stuttering on every word. He tries four times to say
the word “effects”.
“My favourite stuff was Shakespeare. I have the complete
Shakespeare at home, probably about three or four versions of it, in a box, in
my garage.”
So do I. I’m an English student. I love Shakespeare. I could
go now and pick up anything of his and read through it. Just like Paul could.
Now he cannot even read the word ‘budget’.
Nothing has hit me as hard as this minute of TV for months.
I had been sat in my little ivory tower of ‘well, why didn’t they just learn?’,
but now I felt all that come down. Because I could see myself in Paul: exactly
what happened to him could happen to me. I was hit by a basic lesson: you
should not assume that everyone is starting from an equal point.
From here, I stayed a lot quieter, trying to properly digest
the program and actually listen to the eight, rather than just my own preconceptions
about what their difficulties in reading and writing must say about them. I
feel like Craig is speaking directly to me when he says, “People who can read
and write do take it for granted. […] Unless you’re in the situation you don’t
know how hard it is.” Craig has dyslexia, along with at least 10% of the
population.
Disruption to the everyday life of someone with dyslexia can
range from slightly longer processing times when reading and writing,
struggling to remember the words someone used, to thorough disruption of what
most would consider their usual routine. But
dyslexia does not affect IQ: people such as Einstein and de Vinci are now
thought to have been on the dyslexic spectrum.
The number of British adults who struggle to read and write
includes some who are dyslexic, and some like Paul who have suffered brain
injuries. Many other factors may place people in the category of ‘functionally
illiterate’, which the National Literacy Trust describes as those who can “understand
short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently,
and obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from
unfamiliar sources, or on unfamiliar topics, could cause problems.” Over 7
million people in the UK are functionally illiterate.
“I can believe it,” my mum replies after I sceptically read
this stat out to her. She works in one of the local village primary schools.
“Some of the kids who leave us, they can barely read and write. No one’s going
to sit down and teach them how to write at secondary school if they don’t
already know. I think we fail them.”
Most children start reading around the age of 4, but if they
are not talked to, listened to, asked questions, and interacted with in other
ways from the earliest stages of their cognitive development, it will be
exponentially harder for them to catch up with the progression of their peers
as they grow.
This is why affective access and outreach are important.
Essential. We sit in the libraries of Oxford, reading ground-breaking theses, while
in this very constituency 12.5%
of residents hold no qualifications. We cannot
strive for progression in our diverse fields without considering where
progression is needed, closer to home: the UK has the largest literacy gap
between employed and unemployed in the Western world.
Clearly, the decisions being made at the top are not
filtering down to make an effective system. Perhaps this is partly because those
decision-makers are ignorant of the reality. With a cabinet that was 64%
privately educated (compared to 7% of the country as a whole), this is
hardly surprising.
Government-backed research has found that schools with an
‘Outstanding’ Ofsted rating have better performing students than those from
schools that ‘Require Improvement’. Selective and fee-paying schools have the
best performing students. You don’t need me to tell you that most of the best
performing children are thus from most affluent families. Of course, not all well-off
people have high literacy rates, and many less-well-off people do. But the
trend is still striking: Britain’s
most influential people are over 5 times more likely to have been to a fee-paying
school than the general populatio[EH1] n. While the results of this system
are far from the only factors limiting the literacy levels of UK adults, they
are a large part that needs urgent addressing. The Write Offs shows that
effective help can most definitely be given: all eight of the participants
progressed at least 3 school-years of reading and writing in 16 weeks.
34-year-old Dean, a telecoms engineer with the reading age
of a nine-year-old, reminded us at the end of the program why this help is
necessary.
“Did you know that
there is a staggering number of young offenders with reading and writing
difficulties. Now, imagine if these young offenders were given a teacher like
we’ve had. Someone to tell them that their big, beautiful brains just think
differently to everybody else’s and need teaching in a different, more informed
way. Albert Einstein, Sir Issac Newton, Thomas Edison, all had a dyslexic
brain, just like mine. My question to you all is do you think we could stop
wasting good minds? Do you think we could unlock the next Einstein?”
