A CHARITY has announced a £10 million campaign to help thousands of disadvantaged children in the North-East learn to read and write.

The five-year project will work with all 880 primary schools in the region to tackle low literacy and narrow the gap between children from poorer households and their better-off classmates.

The Education Endowment Foundation is launching the campaign today (Thursday, November 5), backed with a £5 million grant from the Northern Rock Foundation.

It follows a recent IPPR report which found that poorer children in the north of England are already falling behind similar children in the south and have bleak educational prospects before they even start secondary school.

The North-East has twice as many disadvantaged pupils as the national average and they are twice as likely to be struggling to read and write by the time they reach secondary school.

Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, said: “We know that good literacy is absolutely fundamental to success in secondary school and later in life, but your chance of leaving primary school without decent reading and writing skills is significantly increased if you come from a poor home."

He added: “We hope the campaign will leave a lasting legacy of evidence-based programmes and effective practice in the region, building on the good work already underway in schools.”

Most of the funding will be targeted at schools with the highest numbers of disadvantaged pupils and the greatest literacy challenges, although all the region’s primary schools will benefit from new resources made available during the campaign, including guidance on the best ways to improve literacy skills in early years.

The North East Literacy Campaign aims to create what it calls “a reliable self-improving primary school system” which ensures the maximum possible number of pupils are able to read and write well by age 11.

Dame Jackie Fisher, trustee of Northern Rock Foundation, added: “All the evidence shows that children who do not read well by age eleven have significantly less chance of achieving good GCSEs and of moving into work.

“We hope this programme will help to break a cycle of poor literacy amongst disadvantaged children in the North-East, and improve the lives and employability of young people across our region.”