Our Online Reading Volunteers Programme connects schools and families with corporate volunteers. These volunteers spend 30 minutes reading online with the same child each week.

Seamless and impactful

Watch our video to see how easy our programme is to use and how teachers and volunteers describe its benefits to children's reading confidence! Chapter One's time-efficient, flexible model for online volunteering will enhance your company's employee engagement, whilst fulfilling CSR and social value commitments around education, social mobility and inclusion.

Impact

St Thomas started with Chapter One in 2024 and completed the project with year one in July 2025. All the children moved levels with some children making three level progress across the year!

Some highlights from the team

St Thomas have been great at making the programme run smoothly and always keeping on the laptops which enabled the sessions to happen. This all led to 55 reading hours with eight Chapter One children at St Thomas. Bearing in mind that the programme can start in September next year which would provide an extra month of reading.

● At Chapter One our aim is to achieve 80-85% reading sessions rated GOOD and Courtney’s classroom has achieved above 90% every week. This means that the session’s happening lasted between 10-30 minutes with no technical issues.

● Looking at the report we can see a positive trajectory of progress. Hopefully you can see that the programme has increased children’s confidence and engaged them with reading in another way. I think the report provides an honest reflection of just how much a volunteer can impact a child as the reading sessions accumulate throughout the year.

● Volunteer messages and positive quotes: “As usual Tamara was very engaged in reading and playing games. A really good effort today.” “Afomia did really well on everything today and really tried hard. I was very pleased”