Literacy skills are crucial to a young person’s development and play a vital role in laying the foundations for progression in later life. As part of our social mobility strategy, we run literacy programmes where employee volunteers help students with their reading.

Chapter One

We have worked with Chapter One, an online reading support platform, since 2020. The programme pairs pupils from Moreland Primary School with employee volunteers, who commit to a 30-minute reading support session every week.

The programme is proven to help students improve their reading. The pupils that took part in the 2022/23 academic year increased their reading by an average of 3.8 levels. Chapter One also aims to boost children's enjoyment of reading and spark their excitement about the world of books.

I can definitely see a difference in my student’s confidence. To begin with he was very shy to use expression when reading sentences with exclamation marks but now, completely unprompted, he will give a little hand gesture whenever he is using expression. It is really great to see his confidence grow.
Stephanie Schiller, Associate and Reading Partner Volunteer, Slaughter and May

Reading Partners

At St Luke’s Primary School, we support an in-person reading programme where volunteers from the firm provide one-to-one reading support for students that need it most. Our employee volunteers visit their reading partners once a week at the school to help them improve their skills through reading and literacy games.

Young Readers Programme

In addition to our primary school reading programmes, we have also funded the National Literacy Trust ‘Young Readers Programme’ in both Moreland and St Luke’s Primary Schools for 15 years. The programme supports children to develop their love of books and reading through a series of fun events focused on book choice and reading for enjoyment. Over the past 15 years, the programme has supported over 2,000 children and gifted close to 6,000 books. In 2022/23, our funding of this programme enabled the distribution of 900 books.

The reading scheme is very popular with our students; they find it really enjoyable and having a dedicated person they can read with one-to-one is invaluable to the development of their literacy skills.
Keith Grey, Assistant Headteacher, St Luke’s Primary School