I was told back in January to keep this project under wraps and now I can share this amazing new program ‘Jay Blades: Learning to read at 51’ will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

In January 2021, The Cascade Foundation was approached by a TV producer (Lauren Bennie) from Hungry Bear Media asking for help for a TV presenter who had been diagnosed with dyslexia at university at the age of 30 years old. He passed his qualification but still could not read at 50 years of age. This was causing him problems with his scripts that he had to read for the program the Repair Shop. The person that we are talking about is Jay Blades.

Being that Jay’s story and mine are very similar, I too was diagnosed at university at the age of 40. I was lucky to find a tutor (Sue Blackburn) who constantly helped and encouraged me to understand my own way of learning. She has stood by my side for 20 years and is now the secretary of The Cascade Foundation.

Lauren had seen my work from the Channel 4 program ‘The Write-Offs‘ and also my work on mentoring and coaching projects with the prison ‘Dyslexia Behind Bars’. Lauren wanted to know how we could help Jay. We shared videos and the kind of techniques that you can use to teach adults to read in particular so that they could get ideas of the type of things that they could be filming. She said: ‘I have watched some of your YouTube videos you’ve mentioned, which are brilliant. It’s such amazing work that you do. The ‘Surprise, Surprise’ was wonderful to watch, and clearly so deserved!’

In April the BBC had commissioned the documentary so we have been waiting to see how this latest project would air out. We have been in touch with Jay’s executive producer who remarked: ‘what you do is clearly very interesting and valuable so thank you’.

What pleases me that in the Metro article it mentions that: ‘nearly half of all prisoners either couldn’t read or struggle while more than 8 million adults in the UK struggle with literacy the BBC said’.

We all really need to get behind this program. This issue is huge and it needs to be addressed!