People

Alistair Lomax joined Reading Quest as Director in January 2009. His background is in growing small organisations. Most recently he was CEO of the UNIAID Foundation, a charity helping students cope with financial hurdles to Higher Education, which was supported by the likes of HSBC, the Cabinet Office, the Learning and Skills Council and Aimhigher. UNIAID’s online programmes were used by 3.7 million people since its formation in 2001. Training and resources are used by schools and universities throughout the UK.

With an MBA, Alistair is able to draw on diverse experience gained through business, education and philanthropy. Alistair was brought up in a home that was stuffed with books of every kind. His goal is to expand the work of Reading Quest so that more children benefit all over the country. As a father of two young children, Alistair is fascinated by their own ‘reading quest’.

Arthur Diggle describes himself as a lover of books, a fan of plain English, an avid supporter of the apostrophe and a lifelong crossword addict.

Arthur is a management accountant of 30 years’ standing who established an accountancy and bookkeeping services practice in 2007. He looks after a small number of clients in addition to Reading Quest where he maintains the day-to-day bookkeeping activities together with Payroll, financial planning and Credit Control. He is an expert user in Quickbooks 2006/8, Excel, Sage Line 50 and other systems. Arthur’s clients include leasing brokers, natural stone importers, landscape gardeners and a marketing services company.

Penny Tyack is the founder of Reading Quest.

As a primary school teacher Penny was inspired by children’s energy and drive to learn, but she was frustrated by seeing children who just hadn’t managed to learn to read. Reading Quest grew out of research she did for her MA at Oxford Brookes. It took shape on a rough estate where school failure spelt trouble. Seeing children succumb to the magic of books and stories is a constant thrill even after fifteen years, and working with adults who share this passion is awe-inspiring.

Penny is currently writing a book about Reading Quest which is due for publication in 2010.

Mary Partridge is an avid reader. She has a BA in history from the University of Oxford, an MA from the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham) and a PhD from the University of Birmingham. She has several years' experience teaching history and literature in the HE sector, both in the UK and in Canada. As a PhD student at Birmingham, she took part in the Access to Birmingham programme, completed a Researcher in Residence placement at a maintained secondary school, and achieved an M-level qualification for postgraduate teaching assistants.

Mary loves reading to, and with, her young nephews and niece. She was attracted to Reading Quest because (among other reasons) she remembers a hiccup in her own 'reading quest', when a small problem with her eyesight temporarily affected her confidence with printed words at the age of six. She welcomes the opportunity to work for an organisation that helps children overcome whatever stumbling blocks they encounter during their early experience of literacy.

Following a degree in modern languages and literature, Diane qualified as a teacher and taught for several years in a secondary school in West Yorkshire. She moved to Oxford to join Oxfam, where she worked for 25 years in a variety of programme management and fundraising roles in Oxford and far-flung corners of the globe. In 2005 Diane took early retirement. Attracted by the nature of its work, she joined Reading Quest as a volunteer.

Candida Hunt has a lifelong passion for books and for their ability to widen horizons, to inform and to fire the imagination. After a childhood spent mostly reading books and riding ponies, her first career (spanning 30 years and combined with raising a family) was in book publishing as an editor, author and project manager.

Candida is now a training consultant and parenting educator specialising in healthy lifestyle and childhood obesity prevention as Programme Director of HENRY (Health, Exercise and Nutrition for the Really Young) which she created with Professor Mary Rudolf of the University of Leeds.

Candida was a founding director of the parenting charity Family Links, and authored The Parenting Puzzle – How to Get the Best Out of Family Life (Family Links, 2003), the Nurturing Programme course book.

She describes as ‘vital’ the task of bringing the world of books to all children, and is delighted to support Reading Quest.

Sue Matthew became involved with Reading Quest when she retired after 30 years of teaching in Tanzania, Indiana and Oxford. St Ebbe’s School in Oxford, where she was headteacher, was one of the first schools to have Reading Quest tutors working with children and their families. The programme was embedded in the school through staff training and the excellent results continue. Sue is proud to be part of a charity that brings reading skills and joy to all who receive it.

Pat Norman has spent most of her working life in education; mainly in Higher Education but latterly in secondary school education. She has become increasingly aware of the crucial part literacy plays in a person’s life chances. For a child to access a secondary school curriculum he or she must be able to read by the age of 6 years, so every effort has to be made to ensure every child can do this.

Amanda is a primary teacher who has grasped opportunities to do a range of jobs: language support teacher, special needs advisory teacher, Director of the Oxford City Reading Project. She has worked with every age from nursery through to secondary and special schools, supporting a wide range of initiatives including Books and Beyond and Storysacks. Amanda is currently working within Adult Learning. She has recently worked for Buckinghamshire as one of their Primary Literacy Consultants, and is Tutor Manager for Family Learning, working with parents and carers and supporting them with their children’s learning.

Amanda says:
‘For as long as I can remember I’ve loved to read. When I’m reading I’m transported to another world. It could be an imagined place or a real one, but whichever it is I can lose myself there for hours. I want all children to experience this joy and perceive the endless possibilities. I believe that every child has a basic right to become a reader. This enables them to make real choices, not just when they are children but also when they move on to adulthood. Reading Quest can catch children when they are young by building their self-confidence and feelings of success.’

Sue’s school, East Oxford Primary School, was described as “a thriving and harmonious multicultural community” by OFSTED in February 2008. She has been headteacher here for 3 years. She is passionately committed to developing her pupils’ diverse talents through a creative curriculum.

In the early 1990s, whilst working as a Special Needs Coordinator in a London primary school, she trained as a Reading Recovery teacher. Since moving to East Oxford Primary School in 1998 she has championed the importance of individual literacy teaching to ensure children’s successful start to school. More than 250 children at the school have participated in Reading Quest in the last ten years.

Originally from a Finance background, Simon is an experienced executive with several years of international experience in a large corporate environment.

As chair of Reading Quest’s Board of Trustees, he is working with the management and other trustees to enable Reading Quest to fulfil its’ potential and reach as many children as possible.

Having watched his own children grow up and learn to love reading, Simon is proud to be associated with an organization that can have such a profound effect on a child’s life.

Janice has been associated with Reading Quest from its earliest days. Her first teaching appointment in Oxford, approximately twenty years ago, was as an advisory support teacher for special educational needs. Through this work she met Penny Tyack and so began her involvement with Reading Quest. She is proud to be part of its mission to enable all children to access the richness of language, imagination and information in books.

Latterly, Janice was a primary school headteacher in Oxford, with a passionate commitment to helping all children to realise and develop their potential, and her pupils and families benefited directly from the work of Reading Quest. She knows how important it is to ensure that children have the support they need to develop as confident readers and writers, enabling them to become independent learners.

Janice has been a lifelong ‘bookworm’ and continues to want to share the wonder of books with children and adults.

Linda joined Reading Quest to bring her significant experience in strategic development of organisations. Her professional life is with a dual track in both education and corporate business. Her career spans decades of strategic consultancy with clients in over 15 industries in 30 countries in the public and private sectors. She has held corporate roles in strategy at Oracle and Royal Dutch Shell. At Shell she was responsible for developing the strategy and leading a successful launch of a spin-off company in the highly competitive high technology industry. Whilst at Shell, she volunteered for the Shell Head Teacher Mentoring programme and worked with an inner city school where the challenges of literacy were manifold with 43 languages spoken at the school. Earlier in her career, she held academic positions at Stanford and Princeton and other universities with an initial focus on educational policy and economic development and later an emerging focus on teaching strategic management.

She is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Department of Management where she teaches enterprise development and entrepreneurship. In a parallel mode, her consultancy firm, Hickman & Associates provides consultancy in business development for entrepreneurs and mature organisations seeking to enter new geographic or product markets. At LSE, she recently was named faculty mentor for Stelios Scholars assisting disabled entrepreneurs.

Linda is active as a volunteer serving on boards of charitable organisations in the US and UK. Linda is committed to advancing individual achievement and helping Reading Quest attain its goals of opening the doors of opportunity by developing the key skill of literacy in young learners.

Robin Hill, who has been involved since the outset, is Treasurer of Reading Quest. He is a chartered accountant and has an honours degree in History. His other charitable work has included a music festival in Switzerland, various small local charities and a multi-million pound group of charities managed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. His professional career has encompassed work in manufacturing, marketing and professional services. He did his accountancy training in Oxford and is Director of Oxford Capital Partners, a venture capital company. Other interests include exploring out-of-the-way Turkey with his wife and skiing (less well than he used to). He lives in West Sussex.

Les Hopper became involved with Reading Quest as a volunteer tutor and, after discovering the almost ‘magic’ effects Reading Quest has on children, has since joined the board of trustees. Originally trained as geologist, Les gained experience of working with school groups and the general public on a daily basis as part of a small Dorset-based educational charity.

Les has a deep-rooted love of books and a long-term interest in education, and combines them with his passion for science in his day job working for a large UK educational publisher. This work takes him into schools regularly, where he sees at first hand the problems that low levels of literacy can cause.

Influenced by his experiences in education, and a childhood spent surrounded by books, he has become a passionate advocate of the view that literacy is the cornerstone of education, opening up a world of possibilities that should be made available to all.