Children who have failed to master the basics of reading by the age of 6 are becoming the best in their class after only a few hours of specialist one-to-one tuition under a programme to be extended to all primary schools in England.

The 30 hours of specialist teaching over 12 weeks helped children who were two years behind their classmates to catch up. Two years later they had overtaken them.

As well as improving progress in reading at four times the normal rate, the government-backed Every Child a Reader programme is also bringing about improvements in writing and motivation.

Jean Gross, director of the programme, said that, contrary to some expectations, the positive effects of the scheme were still felt by children long after the specialist help had ended.

“This shows that it is possible to overcome the reading problems that blight the lives of so many children and adults,” she said.

She added that the scheme worked best when children were aged between 5 years and 9 months and 6 years and 3 months, which is believed to be the crucial age range for establishing reading skills.

An estimated 35,000 children — 6 per cent of the year group — leave primary school each year hardly able to read or write.

Without help, these children can fall farther behind, so that by the time they are 16 only 500 will attain the Government’s benchmark of five GCSE passes at grades A* to C.

As a result, many are unemployable. According to research by the accountancy firm KPMG, they will cost the country about £2 billion a year in unemployment, health, crime and other related costs.

“If we can cut down on the national illiteracy rate and invest our money in primary schools now, we can recoup that investment many times over later on,” Ms Gross said.

The project uses teachers who have been specially trained in the programme’s Reading Recovery techniques.

They identify the weakest readers at the age of 6 and provide them with half an hour of one-to-one tuition every day for between 12 and 20 weeks.

An evaluation of the progress of 500 children on the scheme, two years after they received their tuition, shows that many go on to outperform the national average in reading and writing tests.

The study, by the Institute of Education, found that by the end of Year 2 at school, at the age of 7, the children had an average reading age of 7 years and 9 months.

The scheme, developed with a charitable donation from KPMG, was also found to help schools to tackle one of the most intractable of education problems, the attainment gap between girls and boys. Two thirds of the worst readers at the age of 6 are boys. At the end of the study period, researchers found that boys had more or less caught up with girls.

Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said: “The results are particularly striking given that children on the programme are in the bottom 5 per cent nationally for reading when they start.”

The Government has pledged to introduce the Reading Recovery programme across the country so that 30,000 children a year will have access to it by 2010-11.

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