A campaign for our children's future

12 April 2012

There has been an enormous, heartening response to this paper's campaign, Get London Reading, which seeks to address the crisis of illiteracy in London. The total in donations has now reached more than £100,000 thanks to generous grants from Waitrose and Barclays Bank - the first supermarket and bank to support the campaign.

That money will be used to train at least 600 volunteers with our partner organisation, Volunteer Reading Help. They will work in schools in deprived neighbourhoods, giving one-to-one help to children who struggle to read.

There are other heartening signs, too, that London is mobilising behind the campaign: one council is allowing staff to take time off work to mentor children's reading. This is genuine civic engagement, a chance to change children's lives through the involvement of public-spirited individuals and businesses. Celebrities are making their own contribution. Pop singer Peter Andre is supporting our literacy campaign and helping to launch the Mayor's own drive to recruit 500 volunteers to help families with reading.

Mr Andre has spoken of his pride that his six-year-old son corrects his grammar; this not only suggests that the boy's school deserves credit but that Mr Andre's own bedtime reading with his children is benefiting them both.

For all the good work done by organisations that combat illiteracy, the best and most effective place for children to learn to love books and reading is in the home, with their parents.

Of course, the problem of illiteracy will have to be tackled at every level: schools' strategies for teaching reading, the early diagnosis of dyslexia, public awareness of the importance of parents reading to children and the problems that children have in families whose first language is not English. Our campaign will at least, we hope, help individual children who might otherwise struggle for years with reading and, as a result, never fulfil their potential. Reading is a source of inexhaustible pleasure as well as an indispensable economic skill: we want every child in London to read easily and well.

Dying on screen

The BBC's decision to broadcast Terry Pratchett's documentary showing 71-year-old John Smedley being given poison at a Dignitas clinic to bring his life to an end was heavily criticised in advance. But the Corporation was right. The programme, seen by millions of people last night, did not in fact glamorise the ending of a human life; it showed the act for what it was, something serious and poignant and, in some ways, horrifying.

What the broadcast has done is usefully raised all the issues around this contentious subject. If Mr Smedley's act were legal here, would that not put terminally ill people under pressure to end their lives rather than burden their families?

Would the right to die become the duty to die? What about hospices? Do they not provide the means to die well and painlessly - not just in institutions but in people's homes? And do they get sufficient support to meet their patients' needs? These are all issues that are opened afresh with this documentary; the BBC deserves congratulation for screening it.

MPs on bikes

There is a new rack of Boris Bikes outside Westminster: an unrivalled opportunity, then, for MPs to lead the way in adopting this healthy, environmentally friendly means of getting to work. We look forward to seeing Communities Secretary Eric Pickles lead the way.

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