Primary teacher with MS calls on Mayo schools to sign up to the MS Readathon

The OECD's latest PISA report was the largest of its kind, covering 91 countries and economies and ranks Ireland first in the EU for reading, third for science and fourth for maths. But inside that good news is a warning the report itself doesn't shy away from: globally, reading scores have fallen by 28 points since 2015, the steepest decline of any of the three core skills measured, and the share of ‘hasty readers’, students who rush through a text and guess rather than think, has nearly doubled since 2018. “Most troubling,” the report notes, “is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read.”

In a world flooded with information, the OECD warns that students are losing the habit of slowing down.

For Keith Byrne, a primary school teacher at Virgin Mary Boys National School in Ballymun, Dublin, that finding lands somewhere very familiar. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2015, Keith has spent the years since rebuilding his own relationship with focus, patience and words and, as a teacher, watching up close how a child's relationship with reading gets built or lost in the first few years of school.

This year, Keith is MS Ireland's ambassador for the MS Readathon, now in its 39th year, and he believes the event is one of the simplest, most effective antidotes to the drift the OECD is describing.

"These are the kids' formative years," Keith says. He's seen how a book doesn't need to be long or dense to leave a mark and how the wrong kind of book, one that looks too big or too text-heavy, can put a reluctant reader off before they've even started.

“These books look like normal novels, but there's only a small amount of writing on each page, so they're able to get through it and they're led by the pictures too," he says of titles like Dog Man and Captain Underpants, both hugely popular with his own students and his eldest son.

It's a philosophy that maps neatly onto what the OECD data suggests and that Irish schools most need to protect: not necessarily more reading instruction, but more reading for pleasure in short, achievable, low-pressure bursts which is what the readathon model is based on.

Rather than assigning a single ‘worthy’ book, the challenge simply asks children to read anything from a comic to an audiobook, regularly and for a sponsored period, with no test at the end beyond finishing the story.

Keith isn't the only one who can trace a lifelong reading habit back to a childhood Readathon. Speaking on Ryan Tubridy's podcast last year, Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris recalled taking part in the MS Readathon himself as a child, describing how he "gorged on books" while getting sponsored for the challenge, long before either books or public life shaped his career.

It's a small detail, but a telling one: for many adults now shaping policy on literacy and education, their first serious relationship with reading began with exactly this kind of low-stakes, sponsored challenge.

The MS Ireland chief executive Ava Battles said that the MS Readathon does two things at once. It encourages a lifelong love of reading in children, while also helping fund vital services for the more than 11,000 people living with MS in Ireland.

For Keith, the stakes go beyond literacy scores. Living with MS means navigating fatigue and, at times, brain fog and he's spoken candidly about how writing and reading became one of the ways he processed his own diagnosis, "putting your heart into a keyboard," as he puts it.

Keith sees the same connective power at work with his students: a shared book becomes a shared language, in the classroom and, eventually, at home. His own eldest son has done the MS Readathon for several years running, and each year, Keith says, he shares a little more with him about his MS, in step with what his son is ready to understand which is like a story unfolding one chapter at a time.

With Irish reading scores currently a rare bright spot in a bleak OECD picture, Keith's message to schools and families is simple: don't take it for granted. Keith said that The MS Readathon is exactly the kind of low-cost, high-impact intervention that keeps that advantage alive for the next generation, one sponsored page at a time.

The MS Readathon takes place throughout November. Schools, families and individual readers can register for free here.