Every morning at St Alban’s Church of England Primary School in Camden, there is reading time on the carpet. These days, Year 2 pupil Ava* sits down with a book and reads aloud - and sometimes one or two other children shuffle over to sit beside her and listen.

At the start of the school year, that would have been hard to imagine. “She was incredibly quiet,” says her class teacher.

A child who wants to succeed

Ava’s teacher is full of praise for her tenacity. “She is a brilliant kid,” she says. “She wants to succeed. She tries really hard.”

By the time Ava entered Year 2 in September 2025, that effort had carried her to the expected standard for reading, even ahead of some of her peers...

But her teacher had a specific worry. She describes Ava’s reading as being “very stilted” with “no intonation”. Ava would miss words without noticing, realising only at the end of a sentence that something was not quite right. Comprehension questions then made little sense to her, because she hadn’t read the text accurately in the first place. She also tended to answer quickly, without pausing to think first.

“Mainly it was the fluency that was holding her back,” her teacher says, “and we were all concerned that she mightn’t sustain the expected level within Year 2.”

Building on what the school had already done

Ava had not arrived in Year 2 without additional support. She had received phonics intervention from Reception onwards, and it had worked - she passed the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check. She had extra input in reading, writing and maths, and a separate reading volunteer who came into school.

“She’s had a lot of interventions to support her learning and her progress all the way from Reception all the way up to Year 2,” her teacher says, “and that will continue.”

What she needed next was consistent practice. Fluency is built by reading often, out loud, preferably with someone listening. Ava has few opportunities to read outside school, which puts more weight on the reading she does during the school day - and there is only so much of that a stretched classroom teacher can fit into a week alongside everything else. “The more input she gets, the better she gets,” her teacher says. Chapter One was chosen as a cost-effective way to add half-an-hour of uninterrupted one-to-one reading practice each week, with the same adult every time.

There was a second reason. Ava takes a long time to warm up to new adults, and her teacher was looking for opportunities for her to practise the back-and-forth of conversation with someone she didn’t already know.

The volunteer who persevered

Ava’s Chapter One online reading volunteer is Neil Brown, who works at Sodexo. His reason for signing up was simple. Reading, as he sees it, is a gift - a skill that makes life richer for a child and an adult alike - and not every child gets the chance to develop it. Without it, he says, you can “put a big dent” in a child’s development for life.

He began reading with Ava at the start of 2026, and the first weeks were not easy. From the back of the classroom, her teacher could hear how the sessions were going. “It was just like, yeah, yeah, no, no,” she recalls. “You know, there’s one-word answers, and then she’d start reading.”

Neil kept going. “He really did persevere,” her teacher says. “I did think he was going to quit at one stage. I was like, this must be painful.”

Neil saw it from his side of the Chapter One reading platform with some sympathy. Putting on a pair of headphones to talk to a stranger can be a daunting thing for a young child, he points out.

From reading words to reading a story

Once the sessions settled, Ava progressed quickly. Neil found that the flashcards and the stories weren’t stretching her, so he moved her up a level - and then, shortly after, up again.

The change he describes most vividly is not about levels, though. It is about how Ava reads aloud. Their sessions moved on from decoding words to noticing what the punctuation was asking for: pausing at a full stop, lifting the voice at an exclamation mark, using speech marks as a cue. After a couple of prompts, Ava began doing it herself.

“She’s gone from just reading the words to actually reading more of a story,” Neil says, “in a way that you would expect someone to read a story to you.” A story read robotically is monotonous, he adds. “It makes it much more interesting - for her and for me.”

In the classroom, her teacher has seen the same shift from a different angle, and picks out one change above all. Ava now notices when she has missed a word. She will read a sentence, stop, say that it doesn’t make sense, and go back. “She’s starting to self-correct. That’s the biggest.”

Her comprehension has followed. “It’s more accurate now because she’s read the text correctly,” her teacher says. “So she gets a bigger picture of what is happening. She understands the context.”

Someone to talk to

Both adults describe a child who has become easier to talk to. Neil found Ava more bubbly, lively and talkative as the weeks went on. Her teacher is careful not to overstate it - “I’m not saying it’s fluent back and forth” - but says the sessions have become much more of a conversation, with Ava properly involved.

Small signs have appeared elsewhere. Ava now reads aloud to other children during morning reading time, something that took a while to get going. And she has started saying that she reads by herself, for her own enjoyment - something she simply didn’t say at the start of the year. “Even that she’s saying it,” her teacher says, “that’s important as well.”

Feeling special

Ask her teacher what has mattered most, and the answer is not about reading attainment.

“I know Neil has moved her up in reading levels,” she says, “but the most important thing for me was not just the academic, it was the social.” Ava sat and talked with an adult who was there for her every week, and afterwards she would come back and tell her teacher about it. “Those opportunities have to be created,” her teacher says. “And this was our opportunity to create that opportunity for her.”

The small things carried weight. Ava was matched with Neil slightly later than the other children and kept asking when he would arrive. She knows which day he will be online, and noticed recently when a session had been cancelled. When the children met their volunteers in person and finally saw the people behind the screen, her teacher describes the effect simply: “They just were made to feel so special. Sometimes our children aren’t made to feel special.”

A teacher who wasn’t convinced

Her teacher is candid that she began the year unsure about what impact Chapter One could have. “I was a little bit dubious at the beginning, because I didn’t know how that would work, particularly with children like Ava.”

In practice, the routine took care of itself. Children got excited when their sessions came round. They talked about the Chapter One stories and games in the playground. And the sessions ran without her needing to stand over them. “Once they knew the routine, it was quite independent.”

That matters in a school with the demands St Alban’s carries. Thirty minutes of one-to-one reading, every week, for a child who needs it - delivered without adding to a teacher’s workload - is time that would otherwise be very hard to find.

Ava’s teacher was worried in September that she might not hold on to the expected standard. What has changed since is not only that she reads more accurately, but that she notices her own mistakes, reads aloud to other children, and talks about reading for pleasure. Her school built the foundations. Chapter One added the extra regular one-to-one practice that has helped her make them her own.

The wider picture

St Alban’s Church of England Primary School serves a community where 61% of their pupils are eligible for free school meals, against a national average of 23%. There are additional challenges, too: 44% of pupils have English as an additional language, and persistent absence stands at 26%, twice the national average. In 2024-25, 67% of pupils met the expected standard across reading, writing and maths combined - a figure that dropped to 56% among pupils facing disadvantage, against a national average of 69% for children not facing disadvantage. The school sits in one of the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods in the country, and 47% of children in the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras are growing up in poverty.

*Ava is not the child’s real name

How can companies get involved in Chapter One?

Chapter One’s virtual, time-efficient, flexible model for volunteering will enhance your company’s employee value proposition, whilst fulfilling CSR or social value commitments around education, social mobility and inclusion. Employees can:

- volunteer online directly from their desks with no travel

- make a direct impact on the lives of children from disadvantaged communities

- support local communities across the UK

- improve their own well-being by helping others

- reconnect with your company’s social purpose

If you’re interested in joining us, we’d love to hear from you! You’ll find out who we currently work with on our partners’ page. You can contact us here or email karen.price@chapterone.org.