Welcome to Jumpstart

Leap into learning

Jumpstart is a new multisensory literacy programme, which aims to teach children to read with comprehension by the end of Grade 2. Jumpstart has been designed based on the knowledge gained from neuroscience and in collaboration with schools in the Caribbean.

Jumpstart includes straightforward training guidance, coaching and mentoring for teachers, alongside classroom workbooks, flashcards and wall display resources. These are made freely available in a digital format to all schools who would like to use them.

Jumpstart is designed by the non-profit Rassmuss Foundation, drawing on their successful development of an early literacy programme in South America, and it is sponsored by the Mustique Charitable Trust.

Goals

To offer a motivating, structured and sustainable literacy support programme which will enable all pupils to learn to read.
To provide professional development and coaching to teachers and classroom assistants which will embed effective and enduring instructional skills.

Mission Statement

The Jumpstart literacy programme’s vision is to increase life-long opportunities for children on St Vincent by improving their literacy skills, so that all pupils become competent readers. The programme also seeks to support teachers in developing their instructional skills and to embed enduring best practices in the classroom.

Outlining the need

In June 2025, St Vincent and the Grenadines was one of 11 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, who met in Guatemala to sign The Antigua Commitment. The aim of this commitment is to create a shared regional agenda that promotes educational transformation. The agreement stated the shared goal:

“That all our children, without exception, achieve literacy proficiency, ensuring that each and every one of them can write, read, and understand what they read by the end of age 9.”

To achieve this goal, the countries will seek to support their teachers in developing their pedagogical practices, and make efforts to provide the enabling conditions that will sustain this transformation. The meeting recognised that the call is ambitious: the signatory countries will work to become territories free of illiteracy, where the right to education is ensured not only in terms of access, but also in terms of quality, equity and inclusion.

Jumpstart seeks to help children escape the cycle of learning poverty.

Frederick Douglass (circa 1879)

In 2021 a Country Review, called Challenges and opportunities in the education system of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, was jointly undertaken by Summa, the OECS and Independent Development Research Centre (IDRC). This report identified the quality of early childhood education and reading difficulties as two of the key areas to address.

There is a clear need to offer a creative, structured and effective literacy support scheme early on in primary schools to tackle this problem at the outset. This will enable pupils to become competent readers far earlier, rather than going on into secondary school unable to read fluently. This fluency will lead to stronger comprehension skills, ensure greater access to all subjects and offer better life-long opportunities. Providing this support requires making motivating and sustainable literacy resources, as freely available as possible, and offering professional development training and resources for families alongside them.

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

Frederick Douglass, Social reformer, abolitionist and statesman.