It costs just 92p per day to give a struggling child a volunteer to read with them

Looking forward: Sue Porto is fighting to bring literacy and better lives to London's children
12 April 2012

The insults flew at Sue Porto from the murderers, armed robbers and drug dealers at the back of the room.

"Bitch! Whore! What do you know?" they shouted. Some carved obscenities about her on their desks and made lewd comments.

But Ms Porto, a social reformer then in her thirties and with glamorous looks that belied her toughness, ignored the taunts. As chief of rehabilitation programmes for the Prison Service, she ran behavioural therapy courses in prisons countrywide - including Wandsworth, Holloway, Pentonville, and Feltham in London - and she knew very well that the bravado was a front.

"These were some of the most dangerous criminals in the country, but when you worked with them, what became clear was their chronic lack of self-esteem," she said. "And the biggest cause for this, I discovered, was something very basic: their inability to read and write.

"Some couldn't read at all, almost half had the reading age of a seven-year-old. One day, I was with a group of prisoners who were humiliating a fellow inmate who couldn't read, so I gave a script in Russian to the head bully and asked him to read it out loud. 'How do you expect me to read this - you trying to make me look dumb!' he yelled.

The exercise had a profound effect - it helped them understand that because somebody can't read, they're not necessarily stupid."

Ms Porto ran dozens of inventive rehabilitation programmes for the Prison Service over the years because she believed in people's capacity to change, she said. But she also saw how difficult it was at a stage when illiteracy was just one problem among many, including drug and alcohol addiction.

"It got me thinking - what if we catch them young? Are there early interventions we can do to prevent people going off the rails?"

Today Ms Porto, 41, is the newly appointed chief executive of a children's charity that seeks to do just that. Volunteer Reading Help is the biggest national provider of one-to-one reading support for deprived primary school children who have fallen too far behind their peers to be helped by their teacher in a whole class situation.

This week we are championing VRH as part of our Get London Reading campaign - because, like Ms Porto, we believe that early intervention is the key. "A reading volunteer is giving children the gift of reading and providing the one-to-one attention many never have at home," she said.

"Often the reading volunteer is the only consistent adult role model in a child's life, especially for those from an 'in care' background.
"But let me be clear. We are not about blaming the parents - many lead hardworking lives and some can't read English themselves. And secondly, the volunteers are not there to teach kids to read but rather to support them and encourage a love of reading.

"We recognise that teachers are under enormous pressure and cannot gear lessons to the weakest readers. By offering one-to-one support outside the classroom, we build ability and confidence in children who are often suffering from low self-esteem."

Ms Porto, a single mother of three and a once rebellious teenager who left grammar school at 16 with five O-levels, empathises with these children.

"I was a disruptive pupil, bunking off, not thinking I was worth a great deal and not knowing what I wanted. I associated reading with work and never read for enjoyment and I became a trainee hairdresser with no direction in life."

Later she became a switchboard operator at HMP The Verne, an adult male category C prison off the Dorset coast. "My parents ran a B&B nearby and some of the temporary prison staff would stay with us and so I became intrigued about the place."

But by her mid-twenties, Ms Porto was a low-earning mother stuck in a bad marriage. "I felt crushed by my husband and desperately unhappy in my marriage.

"One day he walked out on me leaving me penniless, and with our two young children (aged two and five) to bring up on my own. As he left, he shouted, 'Without me, you're nothing! You'll spend your life on benefits!' I thought, stuff you, I'm going to make something of my life."

She enrolled at the Open University where she took a course in psychology and was soon promoted by the Prison Service when deputy governor Jeannine Hendrick took her under her wing.

"I went from the lowest grade earning £6,500 a year to a senior manager on £50,000 as head of national training and clinical support. I became a national trainer of prison psychologists and staff and my job was to deliver programmes to reduce the risks of prisoners re-offending on release, and to address their reasons for offending in the first place.

I also ran courses with prisoners, sitting toe-to-toe with them and seeing what worked, what didn't, and why.

"That's when I discovered that the biggest common factor behind their tragically wasted lives was a catastrophic lack of literacy. It affected everything - if they were doing an anger management course, they couldn't read the course material. If they were doing an IT course, they struggled with written instructions. We signed them onto literacy courses, but their inability to read was like a chip in a windscreen - looming large every time they looked up and creating doubt."

After 16 years in the prison service, Ms Porto left to become regional director of the Prince's Trust for south-west England, convinced that early intervention was the answer. For four years she worked with disadvantaged young adults, most of whom had been in trouble with the law or unemployed for long periods.

"Yet again," she said, "I saw a common theme - these kids had become excluded from mainstream society because they couldn't read and believed they had nothing to offer. I understood, then, that unless you get them really young, before they leave primary school, you have a very, very tough fight on your hands."

Eight months ago, she was given her wish. VRH recruited her to inject new vigour and bring her unique perspective to their charity. The added-value that VRH brings to schools is well recognised: a survey of schools supported by VRH has found that 96 per cent of the 5,000 children helped by volunteers nationwide showed an improved ability in their reading and 89 per cent had better concentration.

But with demand for their services growing, they need more reading volunteers if they are to make a dent in illiteracy in London, said Ms Porto. "The battle that our seven-year-olds face when they have nobody at home to read with is something we can do something about.

"At that age they're willing and eager to learn and it's simple and relatively cheap to help them. Believe me, doing nothing is not an option - or rather it's a very expensive option. It costs society £222 a day to keep a prisoner, but just 92 pence a day to give a struggling child a VRH volunteer to read with.

It's a no-brainer. Call it big society, or call it mucking in. We all have a part to play to help our city's children achieve their potential."

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