Oswaldtwistle school takes in toddlers to beat literacy problems

Tina Wilkinson says taking children in earlier helped boost literacy standards

A school has been taking in pupils as young as two to try to stave off childhood literacy problems before they start.

St Andrew's CE Primary School in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, is running the sessions for pre-school children.

Research has found 33% of five year olds in the North West struggle to meet literacy standards.

One teacher told the BBC some secondary schools were taking on primary teachers to help pupils catch up.

A new report by Pro Bono Economics and the National Literacy Trust claims reading problems can have a huge economic cost as children struggle with exams and are at greater risk of unemployment as adults.

Ms Wilkinson said she believed children's use of electronic devices might be having an impact on their listening skills.

She said: "Quite often now in in our world we are watching something online, we are watching something on the iPad: there's always something to look at to give us clues about what we're talking about, so we might not use our listening skills as much."

Ms Wilkinson added: "We've taken the children earlier because when they are with teachers, and people that they're not as familiar with, and other children, it really brings the language [on]."

Tracy Jackson, head of early years at the National Literacy Trust, said: "What we see time and time again is the link between poverty - areas of deprivation - and children's poor literacy.

"We know [poverty] has huge impact on children's literacy."

Year 6 teacher Paul Burns said literacy problems in children's early years were having a knock-on effect as they got older.

"When we do written work, if they don't understand the sentence structure... that can be quite challenging.

"We do a lot of transition stuff with the local secondary schools and they're finding that the children coming to them are [at a lower level] than they used to be in previous years."

He added: "There are some local secondary schools that are employing primary school teachers to teach the children at the level that we are doing now as well."