that they've reached secondary school with this patchy profile, is it realistic to believe that these children can catch up on those lost years? Here's James and Diane Murphy from Thinking Reading.

Yes, they can.

Unfortunately, what happens in secondary schools is often slow paced, not very systematic, and has very low expectations of what students will be able to achieve.

Often support services in secondary schools aren't particularly well coordinated.

But we know that if we directly teach students exactly what they need to know and use ways of teaching that allow them to catch up quickly, the impact is very, very obvious.

In terms of broad headings, we know that they need to be able to decode words accurately.

They also need to know how to use lots of different words, that's vocabulary.

This is James Murphy from Thinking Reading.

It's possible to teach virtually any child in a regular school to read.

Only a very few people with severe language or learning disabilities cannot learn to read.

Children with Down syndrome can be taught to read.

Blind children can be taught to read.

Deaf children can be taught to read.

It's not about the children.

So we see it as kind of an intergenerational cycle as well.

This is James Murphy from Thinking Reading.

There's been a range of research done on this topic of how much illiteracy costs the economy.

One report in 2012 estimated social costs, that's primarily social welfare, hospitals, prisons, at about 23 billion per year.

In 2022, the World Literacy Foundation estimated that the social cost is 25 billion per year.

and the GDP hit is 55 billion per year.

Now, if we take the taxation that we lost from that 55 billion, add it to the social costs, we end up with some very big numbers.

It appears that if we take the 7.1 million functionally illiterate adults that the National Literacy Trust estimates, then the average cost to the taxpayer per person is £215,000.