BROADCAST journalist Kate Adie dropped into a meeting of the Read Easy scheme in Dorchester to give her advice and support to the scheme.

More than 50 people attended the event with members of Read Easy’s Weymouth, Bridport, Blanford and Gillingham branches joining up for the event, which was held at the United Church last Wednesday.

The scheme offers one-to-one tuition for adults who have difficulty reading or people who cannot read. Since starting in Dorchester and Weymouth, there are now 30 groups nationwide helping educate adults.

Ms Adie, former chief news correspondent for BBC News who now presents a show on Radio 4, is a patron of the scheme and gave a talk to the group on what she had learnt about literacy on her travels. She also praised the scheme’s success and the band of volunteer helpers that support people through the course.

Ms Adie said: “I have always been very conscious of people having problems with reading and wanting to help them as I am very passionate that people should have the skills to communicate as it is so important.

“We are lucky enough in this country to have free education and therefore people say: ‘How can you possibly not learn to read?’ but some people do have bad memories of education.

“Some people think they can cope because they can use the internet, but reading is still essential for everyday life.

“There is a suggestion that if you go back to education, or in this case, learn to read, you will be treated like a child, but here that’s not true. Everybody is here to help, everybody is very friendly. It’s not like lessons at school, it’s one-to-one teaching and takes people through specially designed courses and that is hugely important. There are wonderful people here who want to help and want to help people read.”

Moira Pinder, chairman of the Dorchester Read Easy group, said: “There is an assumption that adults can read when in actual fact, one in 20 have real problems with reading.

“Many people who struggle to read have bad experiences of education and a lot of people have developed coping strategies, but after they come here and we give them that one-to-one coaching to improve their skills, it’s really successful and it really improves people’s lives.”