WOULD you like taking part in school-time stories or enjoy rambling with pupils among the apple trees on a stately home estate?

If this sounds like a challenge you'd enjoy and you've the get-up-and-go why not get involved in the Retired and Senior Volunteer Programme.

In the Ryedale and Hambleton areas, the Government-inspired Right to Read programme is conducted by the regional group of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Programme (RSVP), which, notwithstanding its title, is seeking recruits from all adult age groups.

The RSVP is a very active arm of the perhaps better known Community Service Volunteers which was started in this region in 1995. The scheme is organised from York, and since 1998 has supported the Right to Read campaign in primary schools, funded and enthusiastically supported by all the region's local education authorities.

In the three years since then, the north, east and west Yorkshire and Humberside group has recruited an enthusiastic team of more than 660 volunteers to assist teaching staff in some 650 schools, adding up to a grand total of more than 242,000 classroom hours.

Each volunteer gives somewhere between three and five hours a week to help improve the region's literacy standards.

For the fact is that, despite the heroic efforts of teaching staff, last year more than 20,000 11-year-olds in Yorkshire and Humberside failed to achieve the required standard for their age group in English.

After thorough vetting (and checks against two acceptable referees) those wishing to be volunteers will be invited to receive detailed professional instruction on methods to be used in a teacher-aid role.

They then go into their nominated school and listen to and assist children with their reading. This is usually once or twice a week for a minimum of an hour. The volunteer is seen as complementing the work of the class teacher, and often helps to turn reluctant readers into competent ones. Other benefits for the child may include an improvement in confidence, understanding, speaking and even listening skills. The key words for voluntary classroom work of this sort are simple to put into practice: Prompt, pause and praise.

Another nationally launched voluntary educational initiative is a tree-growing scheme for 6-11-year-olds, aimed at combining learning with an understanding of the importance of the environment. This, too, has received the backing of local authority education experts. Children, accompanied by a teacher and volunteer, collect the tree seeds in their various forms - mainly, the well-loved English oak or ash.

Each school receives a tree-growing kit to enable pupils to grow, nurture and then plant out a small woodland of the selected native specimens to improve the local environment. And, with the prompting and help of volunteers, learn at the same time.

In Ryedale, Castle Howard has allowed school pupils on the estate to collect seed and subsequently plant out the small trees. And Castle Howard has co-operated, too, in another line of school tree growing, enthusiastically supported by the RSVP in this region - helping to keep alive old varieties of the region's indigenous apple trees: pupils have already been supplied with and re-planted within its grounds, graftings from some of Yorkshire's neglected strains.

Of lively mind and community conscious? Ready to give a little time and enthusiasm? Write to Neil Cherrett, at Bay Horse House, Thornton-le-Moor, Northallerton, DL7 9EA. Or you can contact him on (01609) 772568, and he'll be only too pleased to put your name forward for consideration for one of the above schemes. Each volunteer will be expected to carry his identity card complete with photograph, and each is covered by CSV's own public and employer's accident liability insurance. Travelling expenses are met.

Updated: 10:16 Thursday, October 18, 2001