There was a programme, many years ago, about a specialist teacher and a class of mature learners who fell short of full literacy. It was extraordinary to watch as the teacher applied different teaching methods to help his students. The majority just needed reteaching in the standard way now they had matured and left childhood restlessness – or miseries – behind. Others needed more specialist help, which gradually winnowed the students down until there was just one left. She was desperate to be able to read, and convinced she never would. Her brain resisted all attempts to unlock the mystery for her, until the teacher realised the student was a kinaesthetic learner and had wooden letters made for her. She ran her hands over them and understood immediately what teachers had been trying to tell her for 40 years.
There was no moment of such high drama in Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51 (BBC One), but the punchy directness of the Repair Shop presenter and furniture restorer kept things lively. For people like him, Blades explained – one of the 8 million adults in the UK who struggle with reading – the process is “like giving yourself a headache … Pure pain.”
He has never read a book (including his autobiography – he told his life story to a ghostwriter) and once took a letter he knew was urgent from the hospital out on to the street to ask for help from a passerby because he had no one at home to help. On The Repair Shop, the production team brief him verbally before each scene rather than provide written notes.
Like an estimated 10% of the UK population, Blades is dyslexic. But he was only diagnosed – after much prompting to make an appointment by his now ex-wife – at the age of 31. Words squiggle around on the page and his brain tries to guess what they are as they slip away from him. This is his first attempt at mastering the elusive skill since school.
We follow him through six months of online lessons with Emma, a volunteer trained in the phonics method. We see enough of their interactions to demonstrate the size of the task before them and his difficulties with it, without lingering unnecessarily. He is provided with coloured filters to lay over the page, which stop the words swimming around. It is fascinating, for those of us lucky enough to have been successfully taught at a young age, to see the learning process anew. And perhaps even more fascinating to feel the innate points of connection that persist between the trained and untrained brain. You feel that, were you coming to it cold as he is, you too would find “muh” for “mouth” easier to understand than “eh” for “egg”. Nothing makes it clearer that the difference between literacy and illiteracy is not one of intelligence or ability – it is only education, and Blades’s childhood illustrates the contingency of that.
“Did my mum ever read anything to me? Nah, that never happened,” he says in response to his fiancee’s question. “Did yours?” Yes, she says. “Really?” Blade’s mum was, he says, a busy, working single parent of two who came to the UK from Barbados at 13 and had got pregnant very young (“The man who contributed to my birth was nowhere to be seen.”) Blades grew up on a Hackney estate in the 70s – not a great place to be then, he says – and went unsupported at school, leaving without any qualifications. He dabbled in drug dealing, but got himself out and into a mature student university place. After a mental breakdown from which he was rescued by people he now calls his chosen family, he went on to the furniture restoration and television career he has now. “They took me in and saved my life,” he says, as he sits down to lunch with them. “If you don’t have support, what can you achieve?” “Well,” says his chosen mum, patting his hand, “you’re here now.”
It’s a fine, tightly focused look at the many interdependent causes of illiteracy, and its effects, with unusually honest appraisals of them from Blades (who seems constitutionally incapable of flannel) and contributors. The educational psychologist Jackie Murray lays the problem out especially clearly. About 25% of state school pupils don’t meet expected reading standards by the age of 11. With dyslexia affecting about 10%, the statistical links between receipt of free school meals and attainment suggest that poverty and the lack of resources to combat it account for almost all the rest.
Read it and weep.
