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In the second programme of the 3-part series about adult literacy, award-winning teacher Phil Beadle is tackling another huge obstacle which has dogged the lives of the adults he's teaching. Phil has taken on the challenge of a lifetime, to improve the literacy of nine adults who have spent their lives being unable to read so that he can experience at first hand, some of the problems experienced by 5.2 million adults in the UK who have a reading age of less than expected of an 11- year-old.
Phil's class consists of a wide range of people whose lack of reading skills affect their ability to live normal lives. In the first programme, we saw how 58-year-old Teresa was unable to go shopping without her daughter to help her, 28-year-old James can't order a simple meal in his local café, and 42-year-old Linda was desperate to achieve her life-long ambition and read Shakespeare. Phil is shocked by the scale of the problem, 'it's tragic, we as a body of professionals have to come up with a solution to this, it's been laying festering for way too long and it's an absolute scandal'.
Within in two weeks of starting the course, Phil's mix of unconventional methods along with the kind of phonics seen in primary schools, had achieved what seemed impossible – both Teresa and Linda have started to read. As Phil says, when you how long they been unable to read, 'that's a century of not being able to read, reversed in two weeks, that is a miracle, isn't it?'
Now in the second programme, Phil turns his attention to teaching his class how to write – and the problems and emotional barriers he encountered in teaching them to read start to present themselves immediately. Linda, who begged Phil to help her to read, is now able to read – but the joy she expected to find in her new ability to read her beloved Shakespeare – has turned to anger and frustration. Whereas Linda used to walk through her home-town enjoying its peace and beauty, she now feels beset by the signs which she can read for the first time in her life: two-for-one offers, buy this, go there, have taken away her peace of mind and increasingly she is staying home, unable to face going to her local restaurant where she used to ask the waiter what on the menu was good – because she's forced to read it. 'It's taken away my peace of mind' she says tearfully, and when faced with the next stage of learning how to write, Linda refuses to pick up a pen.
In just six lessons, fifty-eight year-old Teresa learned more than she did in ten years of school – and she is desperate to prove herself to her mother. It was her mother who contributed to the sense of shame Teresa has felt all her life about not being able to read a word, however now she joined a library for the first time in her life and borrows Little Women, the book her mother told her she'd never be able to read. Yet when Teresa reads to her, her mother calls her stupid for making a simple mistake. Teresa is devastated, "do you think she's pleased? She's still so snappy, maybe I haven't achieved anything anyway."
We also meet another member of Phil's class, single mother Kelly, who's on the course to help with her son's dyslexia. When she thinks about how she's unable to help her kids achieve more than she has done, Kelly is reduced to tears – she doesn't understand the letters sent home from school, everything takes her so long to read that she's forgets what it means, bills, letters pile up and add to her frustration and fears for the future.
As the course continues, we see how Kelly's skills improve, not only in that she's able to help her son, but in proving her talent as a writer; Phil reads some of her writing to the class and tells them that Kelly should be at university, it's a tragedy that she doubts her abilities. But Linda is becoming increasingly challenging in the classes, questioning Phil's teaching methods, until in the end, she walks out, unable to cope.
Will Phil be able to find a way of teaching Linda to write so that she'll continue with the course? And will he be able to restore Teresa's self confidence so that she is able to feel proud of her achievement?
Programme one | Programme two | Programme three
