I love watching documentaries but watching documentaries about something I am really passionate about is something that I absolutely love to do. Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51 is an insightful and touching insight into Jay Blades- who is best known as the presenter of The Repair Shop- going back to basics to learn how to read.
Read is something that comes natural to a lot of us or something we do at school but becomes essential later on in life, when you’re an adult everyone knows how to read, right! Wrong, this documentary portrays what it is like not being able to read and being one of eight million adults just in the UK who struggle to read. That figure is staggering but will Jay be able to turn it around and learn to read at the age of 51.
This documentary was really personal for me because of how much I love reading and how much of a passion it is of mine to encourage others but enabling children having the best start in life by doing something as simple as reading. We go on a journey with Jay finding out about his childhood, his teen years and finally his adulthood and we see how not being able to read has affected his life. After half a century of not being able to read he is going back to the beginning and starting again. His biggest motivator is being able to read a children’s bedtime story to his 16-year-old daughter because he wasn’t able to do it the first time around. Jay explains reading by describing it as a painful headache, for me reading is pure escapism which is my happy place because it can take me anywhere, distract me, help me, or comfort me, but understanding what it is like not being able to read really hit hard for me.
The realisation that it is not only Jay but millions of people, a lot of people are suffering because of barriers that keep people from reading. It was interesting to watch how Jay had got around his whole life without being able to read, but also it is really scary because it makes it hard for people like him to get the help they need. Jay got around not reading because of the help he got from people but also technology. Phones and computers has software such as text to speech which enable you to speak to your phone and laptop and it types for you, things like autocorrect or voice notes make it easier to avoid writings and reading which is another scary thing because we are being reliant on technology, and this is something that needs to be addressed. Jay acknowledges it himself when he says he wouldn’t have got through his life without it. He also memorised huge chunks of information so as to avoid reading and memorise content, reading people’s faces, he went three years as a presenter before telling people he couldn’t read. One moment that stood out for me was when he said he took out an important hospital letter out to the street for someone to read because no one was at home. It reinforces that not being able to read affects your whole life but also what it would do to your ego, to your confidence, to your mental health. This was his coping mechanism but also because he is confident, he is confident in all that he does so to keep up the act of him pretending to being able to read. It was interesting when he met up with other people like him and sharing their coping mechanisms, one of them uses shorthand when writing which only she can understand for biscuits she would write ‘bic’. She uses shorthand because she can’t read the big words. I found it really interesting when Jay also visited a prison and it was shocking to see the rates that half of all prisoners in the UK struggle to read or can’t read at all, and a charity helps prisioners to read and teach others which is a factor to reduce re-offending because you are giving the prisioners the skills to get a job and not being able to read just pushes you further and further away.
Jay also takes the audience through his childhood and his upbringing. Jay comes from a single parent family household where his Mom was working full time with two children, he describes the environment as not always happy but stressful, love and care was missing. He doesn’t blame his Mom which is understandable because of how young his mother was and what she had to do to ultimately survive. Who really failed Jay was the school, and society. He never learned to read or write at school and long after he left school he never got the help he needed. He was undiagnosed and because of the lack of support, Jay having to deal with racism and labelling from peers and teachers as ‘dumb’ or ‘Blades your going to amount to nothing’ it is no shock that Jay left school with no qualifications. This is a re-occurring theme with children who have a similar background to Jay or come from a poorer background the statistics are shocking with 25% or one in four children doesn’t reach the expected level in standard achievement test for 11-year-olds. Children on free school meals do less well statistically. Poverty and the pandemic made that worse the average child fell behind by two months in reading in the pandemic kids on free school meals fell behind seven months because they didn’t have the devices to access these remote lessons from home. It is heart breaking to hear these statistics because I work in the education sector and see the effect first hand. The lack of funding and resources are a factor that we can’t help disadvantaged children to the best of our ability, we need more trained specialist teachers who specifically target these needs and come up with individual pupil plans. If we had these it would certainly tackle these problems and get the help that these children desperately need.
This documentary is inspiring and so powerful it is the start of breaking a cycle and shows you can achieve anything regardless of your age. Jay went on to study at university and was finally assessed as dyslexic. This documentary shows the highs and lows of Jay getting to grips with reading. He has teamed up with the charity called Read Easy which helps people to read and we witness his journey from struggling to read, to reading a children’s story to his daughter. It is heart-warming and I have so much respect for Jay coming out telling the whole world he is learning to read because not only is it going to inspire and help so much more people but I bet it can’t have been easy to admit to confront your worst fears of not being able to read to the whole world. He is brave and he managed to turn it around, I hope he goes on to enjoy and devour books (I mean if he needs any recommendations he only needs to say) and I hope this documentary has inspired others to begin the journey of learning to read no matter what age. I will leave the charity links below- this has also shown me not to take reading and writing for granted but also to look into raising more awareness for adults to learn to read for those who don’t know how to, but also for more specialist teachers and funding for schools and especially disadvantaged children to get the support they need from a young age. I will leave the link of the charities and the documentary below and I hope you read and share this create conversations inspire others to take up reading and help teach it to others or if you can get them help, they need. It was a beautiful documentary and really it should be shown in the Houses of Parliament.
I will end this with Jay’s own words. ‘On this journey I’ll be meeting people who can’t read, for whatever reason, and hopefully helping them. I’d love this film to inspire the millions of other adults in the same situation as me.’
With Love and Dua’s
Fiz @Every Page She Turns.
Shannon trust link- https://www.shannontrust.org.uk
Read Easy link- https://readeasy.org.uk
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