Registered Charity
About us
Who we are
Read Easy was founded in 2010 by Ginny Williams-Ellis. As a literacy tutor at Dorchester Prison, Ginny was responsible for running the Shannon Trust’s prisoner-to-prisoner reading programme. Through this she saw how a confidential, one-to-one approach could encourage people to come forward for support and successfully learn to read. Ginny also became aware of the number of adults who struggle with even the most basic level of reading, not just in prisons, but across the population at large.
It became clear that there was an urgent need for a similar scheme in the wider community. With the support of many local agencies, Read Easy Dorchester & Weymouth was set up to provide free, flexible, friendly and confidential reading coaching to any adult who struggled with reading. In a short time, many people were coming forward and making remarkable progress.
This quickly led to interest from other areas. To meet this wider demand, Read Easy UK was established in 2011 to help volunteers to set up new Read Easy groups in other parts of the country – the same year as a government survey put the number of adults unable to read at 2.4 million in England alone (Skills for Life, Dept. BIS 2011). It became clear that there was no other organisation attempting to provide free, one-to-one reading coaching on a national basis.
Within a year, three further groups had been formed and the organisation has continued to expand ever since. Ginny Williams-Ellis was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2022, for Services to Education, as founder of the adult literacy charity, Read Easy UK.
Our culture and values
Reading is a basic requirement of everyday life, and for many of us it is a skill we take for granted. Yet there are 2.4 million adults in England alone who can barely read or cannot read at all (Skills for Life Survey, 2011, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – latest government figures). In turn, people who struggle with reading may also struggle with writing and have quite a limited spoken vocabulary.
Learning to read as an adult can be life-changing. The benefits can extend beyond the individual and enable families to break the intergenerational cycle of literacy difficulties.
