Toby is nine and loves books. Ever since he was tiny, he has always adored stories: fairytales; tales of pirates, knights and dragons; stories about heroes and villains. He loves space and history and loves facts about the solar system and learning about kings and queens and epic battles as well as social history issues from the past. He loves Lego and wants to be an inventor one day. He is a bright, intelligent and funny nine-year-old. But he cannot read.

Toby is severely dyslexic and also has ADHD which has a huge impact on his working memory and executive function. It would take him an hour or more to read a page of a book and then, by the time he had finished, he wouldn’t be able to tell you what had happened because he had been working so hard on the decoding of the text that the meaning had got lost in translation. His reading age may be the same as a five or six-year-old, but his comprehension skills are very advanced for his age, so the print texts that he is able to access hold absolutely no interest for him. As parents, it’s heartbreaking to see the frustration he faces every day at the huge barriers in his way.

Through the medium of audiobooks, Toby has been able to access literary worlds that he would never have been able to do so via the printed page. He has devoured the entire Harry Potter series; the How to Train Your Dragon series; the Percy Jackson series; all the David Baddiel books, and David Walliams, Matt Haig and Stephen Mangan are all firm favourites too. He talks animatedly about the realms that he has encountered amongst the pages of these books and the characters are as real to him as his friends in the classroom.

As his parents, the ability to give him this gift that so many take for granted is fantastic but comes at a cost. Subscription services like Audible are expensive and, for a voracious reader like Toby, who gets through at least one book a week, the costs soon start to mount up. In the current economic climate, where we are all having to brace ourselves for the escalating costs of food, energy, fuel and interest rates, we had found ourselves trying to steer him towards longer books that would take longer to use up his credits or trying to juggle bedtime for his younger siblings whilst reading to him at the same time. It felt like we were letting him down.

Discovering Calibre Audio has been an absolute game changer for us! Toby can now access as many books as he wants for FREE! There is no more parental guilt about having to say that we can’t afford any more credits this month and the selection available via the charity is incredible, with more being added every week. Opportunities like this, for children who struggle with accessing mainstream learning, are very few and far between. Absolutely everything is expensive for a child with Special Educational Needs and the financial impact on families can be devastating.

The gift of a book is so much more than just the pages it’s written on, it supports education and self-esteem. Giving a child access to the books that their peers are reading, gives them access to peer conversations that they would otherwise be left out of, gives them a breadth of knowledge that will support their wider learning and gives them confidence in themselves. Print disabilities are so often misunderstood as a lack of intelligence, when this is often far from the case, but a child unable to access the same tools as their peers is at an incredible disadvantage: socially, educationally and emotionally.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go”. I can read with my eyes shut! by Dr Seuss.