about US
I struggled to read myself.
One of my earliest memories is my mother’s exasperated face as she tried to help me to read. My brother and sister had both found it easy. But not me.
It was still a problem in my teens and I ended up applying to study engineering as a result.
Somehow, in the gap between school and university something clicked and I became a passionate reader. I almost switched degree by the end of my first year of university.
Then my sons struggled too.
I had really forgotten all about it until I taught my sons to read. I was much less good at dealing with my exasperation than my mother had been. What should have been a fun time together ended up very stressful. I feel bad about it to this day.
So I started researching the basis to learning to read, just to try to get better at helping them. At about that time I helped establish a charity called the Shannon Trust, set up by my father. We were getting prison inmates to teach each other to read.
The interesting thing for me was that the inmates were learning to read fast! Lying in my bathtub in 1999, I was pondering this. The engineer in me asked myself why they had not learned to read the first time around.
There was clearly no innate reason. And back in 1999, the level of scientific understanding of reading in our schools was very, very low. So I resolved to try to fix the problem.
It was a slightly mad Millennium moment. My wife kindly encouraged me on the journey, but has probably rued that day many times. But we do now have the answers to all the big questions. We are confident of getting any child reading.
Understanding the neurology is the key to the castle.
How are you reading this? We don’t really think about it do we, any more than we think about how we walk down the road.
Well, your eyes are perceiving the shapes of all these letters and they pass that information to your visual cortex. Then, through a magical sequence of neural links, you can hear the words I have put on the page and understand them.
So I started to look at this neurology of reading. It is surprising, but most educational theorists were not that interested in the nitty gritty of neurology at the time. But I found that I just loved it! I worked through the entire course book for a neurology degree while lying about on holiday in Italy one summer.
I love all of the little chemical processes that give us what we feel in our brain. It is beautiful and magical.
Failure after failure…
Our progress was driven by our failures. Every time a child seemed to be struggling, we began to explore why. That was from observation of their reading and research into the education psychology papers published.
There was always a rush because you don’t have long when a child is struggling. You either fix it for them or they move on psychologically. And sadly we didn’t achieve a quick enough resolution with some of them.
But over the years our understanding deepened and our failures reduced. I cannot remember the last time we were unsure of what the issue was or the solution.
The End Result
We have built multiple systems that can deliver good progress for children at any stage and in different settings:
The Easyread System is our main solution for parents.
Our school intervention for students aged 9-14 is Reading Copilot.
And All Aboard Phonics is our solution for the early years in school.
– David Morgan
Founder of the Shannon Trust, All Aboard Learning and the Helping Children to Read.