| Home | ||
|
|
|
|
|
| The Shannon Trust, Liberation through reading - Shannon Trust | ||
|
The Shannon Trust is a charity devoted to the development of literacy in our prisons through peer to peer mentoring. The charity encourages prisons to develop mentor teams of inmates, who run daily one-on-one lessons for illiterate fellow prisoners.
The impact on the graduates of the Shannon Reading Plan cannot be overstated. It revolutionises their lives. And the cost to the country is almost nil, since the main resource we use is prison inmate manpower. After several years of testing this simple idea, the Trust is now driving an expansion of the successful system it has developed, across the entire prison estate. We are currently in contact with over 90% of the prisons in the UK and we have successful schemes running in a third of them. We have found that it takes just 3-6 months for an average prisoner to learn to read on The Shannon Reading Plan. The government's statistic is that 48% of all adult prisoners have no useful literacy skills. A further 19% have a reading age of below 8 That equates to over 50,000 prisoners at any one time. And it is a moving parade. The prison population is around 76,000 strong, but 90,000 inmates are released every year. So there is a constant stream of people going through the system We currently have around 1,000 prisoners receiving tuition at any one time. Our aim is for every prison to be running the Toe by Toe literacy scheme on every wing and for the probation service to provide continuity in the months after release for those who have not completed their training. Learning to read should be just part of life for every illiterate prison inmate. It can turn their time inside into an opportunity to change their lives. By this means, we can begin to tackle one of the significant causes of crime, at almost no cost to the taxpayer, since we use inmate manpower for the mentoring. Literate prisoners are enabled to those with reading difficulties short daily one-to-one lessons using the ToebyToe manual. There are beneficial side-effects on the personalities of both parties |
| Tel: | 0207 229 0433 |
|
||||||
| Fax: | 0207 229 0433 |
 |
|
Review Magazines. All rights reserved Tel: 01234 348878 Fax: 01223 790191 Email: sales@pirnet.co.uk Sitemap |
  |