MORE than half-a-million pounds has been set aside to help every child in Oxfordshire learn to read.

Oxfordshire County Council cabinet member for education Melinda Tilley has released the first details of a major reading campaign for Oxfordshire’s youngest children.

Education officialss have been locked in discussions for months to work out how to raise literacy standards.

It follows a series of damning results, which in 2010 placed Oxford’s seven-year-olds worst in the country at Key Stage 1, with almost a quarter failing to reach expected levels in reading.

Oxfordshire as a whole was second from bottom of the 11 other most similar local authority areas.

Now the council has allocated £585,142 for a major push on reading, and has teamed up with the National Literacy Trust to train up teachers and send volunteers in to read one-to-one with children in school.

Mrs Tilley said: “The idea is a child who gets no attention from anybody suddenly finds they are getting attention from someone who cares what they do and what the outcomes are.

“We want to embed the culture into schools for the future so that this doesn’t happen again. This is absolutely vital.”

Ambitious targets have been set for the scheme, due to start in September.

Instead of aiming for an improvement in the proportion of children achieving the expected Level 2, the county council is looking to push the number of seven year olds getting to the higher Level 2B to 86 per cent – a rise of 12 percentage points – by 2015.

To do this, they will be targeting 80 as yet unidentified primary schools, based on Key Stage 1 performance over the last few years and other performance measures.

The council has also set targets to improve outcomes in all stages of education. The goal is that by 2015 65 per cent of pupils will get five good GCSEs including English and maths, up from 57 per cent in 2011.

Universities, teaching unions and libraries will all be involved.

Library service manager Jillian Southwell said: “We already work closely with schools, young people and their families, to encourage a love of reading and a recognition of what the ability to read can bring to people’s lives.

“We see this as a natural extension of what we do already and we’re glad to be able to contribute.”

Oxford Brookes University associate dean Hilary Lowe said staff and students would help with reading in schools and said the campaign would be of “significant benefit”.

The National Union of Teachers will help with training and recruiting volunteers from the army of retired teachers in its ranks.

There are already charities which send volunteer readers into schools such as Assisted Reading for Children, ARCh, which has more than 200 volunteers working with 600 Oxfordshire children.

Helen Russell, from Summertown, has been volunteering for three years. She said: “I’m very keen on reading and I know a lot of children don’t have the opportunities I had so it is a pleasure to help.

“It’s something I can do in my retirement that’s useful.”