The Estate We're In: Play, laughter and children reading, the Standard returns to Angell Town

Reading: A child learns to read in Angell Town estate
Jeremy Selwyn

You hear them before you see them: shrieks of laughter, little feet scampering, the joyful hubbub of children having fun.

These life-affirming sounds were sadly absent last year when the Standard first visited Angell Town, and found this Brixton estate of 4,000 people so preternaturally quiet you could hear a pin drop.

But these days Angell Town, flagship of The Estate We’re In campaign, feels a happier, far less forbidding place.

Not only have the 18 grassroots groups that we funded begun to transform life there, but the local primary school has moved back into the heart of the community.

St John’s Angell Town Church of England school — mothballed two years ago, torn down and rebuilt — reopened this September.

Support: Joanna Sholem of Beanstalk helps Kenzo French
Jeremy Selwyn

And when it welcomed back its 243 pupils, it took on three reading volunteers from Beanstalk, the Standard’s partner for our award-winning Get London Reading campaign.

Deputy head Patrick Williams, 41, said St John’s — where half the roll are eligible for free school meals and 80 per cent speak a foreign language at home — sees the volunteers as part of their reading improvement strategy after below-par results last year.

Unlike most schools, which deploy Beanstalk volunteers to assist readers who have fallen behind the class, Mr Williams has turned the model on its head, assigning them to help the most able.

He explained: “A lot of children enter at a very low reading level. I want to use our volunteers to focus on stretching our more advanced pupils because they might not get the attention they need in a class focused mostly on lower and middle ability.

The one-to-one attention will build their confidence, expression and fluency and give them that extra boost needed to excel in life.”

Beanstalk’s Joanna Sholem said her three charges — Jayrell Sesay, Kenzo French and Isaiah Thomas, all 10 — had made great leaps in the few months she has worked with them.

She sees them for half an hour each twice a week, but for the Standard’s visit invited them for a joint session. “My parents can’t believe how much my reading has improved,” said Kenzo. “Mine, too,” said Isaiah.

“I not only read books to them but read them the letters I bring home from school.” Jayrell looked up from his 220-page book, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid, and said: “I read at home and then my mum asks me over dinner what I’ve learned.

I just read Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger and I didn’t find it hard.” Kenzo, en-grossed in Spirit Of The Jungle by Bear Grylls, added: “If you can’t read, you can’t do anything when you get older — you can’t fill in forms, you can’t do jobs, you can’t run your life. If you can’t read, it’s gonna be your downfall.”

St John’s Angell Town
JEREMY SELWYN

Joanna said: “All three boys are at that point where they are about to take off. It’s incredibly rewarding to see how they’ve come on.

They have progressed from shorter books with larger fonts and read with understanding and expression.

The aim is to get them to a point where they are confident enough to pick up any book and give it a go, where they are truly independent readers.”

The Rev Rosemarie Mallett, chairwoman of governors and parish priest, said: “The school has returned and the community feels the centre of the estate is back up and running instead of being an empty black hole. It has given the estate a sense of anchor and stability.”

However, she is aware of the scale of the challenge. “When the school moved off-site, the percentage of school leavers who met national expectations for reading [the old level 4] dropped to 34 per cent. We have to put up our hands and say the transition was difficult and standards fell to unacceptable levels.

Previous to that we achieved 86 per cent for reading. We have set rigorous targets to get back up and reading volunteers can help make the difference.”

Looking beyond the school gates, Ms Mallett is sanguine. “So many of the community groups funded as part of the Standard’s campaign have taken off and my sense is that it’s making a difference, albeit in an incremental way, which is the most you can expect in an estate of 4,000 people which has the kind of deep problems we do.

“But we have made brilliant progress: new groups have been initiated, seed money given, wider recognition received and people on the estate have learned to rally around positive things instead of the usual negativity.”

The football pitch and the Royal Horticultural Society show garden relocated from the Chelsea Flower Show to Angell Town have had a big impact, she said.

Both have been funded by our campaign along with 18 community groups.

“The pitch is used 24/7 and the RHS gardening project is maintained by a group who would not normally engage in the community.

It’s also brought different ethnic groups of the estate closer together.”

Lorraine Jones, recipient of a Dispossessed Fund grant for boxing project Dwaynamics, agreed.

Life on Angell Town is “most definitely much, much better”, said Ms Jones, who set up the scheme in memory of her son Dwayne, who was stabbed to death in 2014.

“The Standard’s campaign put a spotlight on the pain but also on the potential of the estate.

Some residents found that attention hard at first, but it has changed our estate for the good.”

Dwaynamics is expanding to Tulse Hill estate and beyond.“The response to our work has been amazing,” she said. “I received a Points of Light award from the Prime Minister, I have been invited to Detroit in America to talk about our work and I won an ITV Woman of Achievement Award.

“On Angell Town there is much more positive feeling and we are trying to work with the youngsters and the police so that it’s no longer them against us.

"The Standard’s campaign has given us wings. We’re working together to solve the problem. We are coming into the light.”

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