THE Ministry of Education is to launch a national campaign to encourage parents to read to their children.

The ministry said Wednesday that the campaign will be part of its thrust to achieve 100 per cent literacy at the primary level by 2015.

Schools and parents will receive more books to read at inexpensive rates during the campaign, Education Minister Andrew Holness promised.

The national campaign is to “raise the awareness among parents of the importance of reading to their children”, the minister said.

The minister, who cited young parents in his constituency of West Central St Andrew, said parents allowed television to be their children’s main learning tool, instead of reading to them.

“I don’t see young mothers and fathers reading to their children. The television and other media have replaced the parent in assisting the child in getting meaning from their environment,” Holness said.

The minister, who noted that only $1 billion of the ministry’s $72-billion budget was spent on books, said government was preparing to spend more on books at the earlier (primary) level.

“We’re examining ways of making more reading content available to our students at fairly reasonable rates,” he told an awards function for the Caribbean Centre of Excellence for Teacher Training (CETT) Project at the Knutsford Court Hotel in Kingston.

CETT is a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-sponsored project aimed at improving literacy in the first three grades of primary school.

The project, which involved 22,000 students in 14 Caribbean countries over seven years, yielded impressive results, with 65 per cent of the students reading at or above their grade level after three years in the programme.

Holness thanked the USAID for the project which was an initiative of former US President George W Bush and his wife, Laura. He said CETT fitted “nicely” into the government’s target to have all children reading by Grade Four, or by Grade Six at the latest.