For most people everyday activities like paying bills, emailing a doctor, or reading your children a bedtime story, happen without thinking. But for a hidden minority of adults, these are impossible tasks.
That’s because roughly seven per cent of the working-age population can barely read and cannot write at all. Astonishingly, many still manage to hold down high-pressure jobs, finding ways of navigating the world without even basic literacy skills.
Richard Welton is a volunteer at Read Easy Southwark, a reading coaching programme for adults. He said: “We had somebody who worked with Southwark Council all his working life who’d managed to survive with his job.
“There was also a delivery driver who had coped but as you can imagine it was quite difficult for him to locate the correct addresses.”
Julia Williams, Team Leader at Read Easy Southwark, explained people will come up with “coping mechanisms”.
She said: ”For example, they will listen to messages on their phone rather than read them and dictate messages rather than write them.
“One of our readers, who works in retail, has to memorise everything like buttons on the till.
“She has a visual map in her mind of what buttons she has to press but, as you can imagine, it makes her job so much more difficult and stressful.”
Blessing, 43, is one reader getting coached at Read Easy. The mother-of-four lives in Borough and works as a cleaner.
Last year, she explained to a doctor she was struggling to read correspondence about her child’s health and was referred to Read Easy.
Struggling with reading causes Blessing real strife. Asked what she finds most challenging, she said: “My children’s appointments, my letters from the council. A lot of things!
“My children’s homework because… sometimes they say I’m finished but I don’t know if they did the homework properly. It’s very difficult.”
One of her younger children is unwell and she even has to rely on the older ones to read the dosage on the backs of medicines.
There are all sorts of reasons people may reach adulthood without learning to read; undiagnosed learning disabilities, health problems or socioeconomic problems.
But for Blessing, who was born in the UK but moved with her family to Nigeria when she was just two weeks old, her reading struggles are linked to her education.
Blessing said: “It’s horrible. If you get there late they need to smack you. Maybe they ask you some questions and you don’t know it – they need to whack you as well.”
She developed a fear of reading which was exacerbated at home where Blessing says she was subjected to more physical punishment if she couldn’t do her school work.
“Anytime I had to read a text I would tell them I’m sick so I didn’t have to do my work,” Blessing said.
Since July, Blessing has been meeting up with her reading coach Ailsa in a cosy cafe near her home.
When she started, Blessing didn’t know the alphabet but she can already read simple books.
Blessing, who has ambitions to become a nurse, said: “Oh my god, it’s so nice. I couldn’t read before. I can read now!”
Her volunteer coach Ailsa, who works as a lawyer, said watching Blessing improve had been “really satisfying and exciting”.
“Blessing’s my first adult I’m helping and I’m absolutely loving it and I’m loving seeing how much confidence it’s bringing to Blessing already,” she said.
It’s one of hundreds of success stories at Read Easy which has helped over 1,000 adults learn to read and write across 80 volunteer-led groups across the country.
Jeremy Bowen, International Editor at the BBC, and Ambassador for Read Easy Southwark, said: “It’s tragic that far too many adults can’t read. Around five million adults in England and Wales don’t have the reading and writing skills expected of an average eleven year old.”
A long-time Camberwell resident, he added: “As a resident of Southwark for more than forty years it’s sad to think that people living not too far from me can’t get the pleasure I’ve had all my life from the written word.”
Adult illiteracy isn’t just bad news for those involved, but for the nation as a whole. According to the World Literacy Foundation, low levels of literacy costs the UK an estimated £81 billion a year in lost earnings and increased welfare spending.
Southwark Read Easy Team Leader Julia said: “We’re not talking about people reading War and Peace.
“Of course, many may go on to read books and get real pleasure from a good story, but it’s much more about getting them to a functional level so they can navigate their lives more easily. “
For further information on help with reading or volunteering as a coach, please contact Richard Welton on 07981 963154 or via email: southwarknetworker@readeasy.org.uk
All coaches and management team members in the Southwark Group are volunteers but the group has to pay for teaching material and training courses. If you wish to help with funding these items, you can do this via Just Giving at https://www.justgiving.com/readeasysouthwark