Abracadabra will be the first all-day, every day radio service in Britain for children aged up to ten. It is due to go on air in London in January 2002. Digital Radio Group, a consortium that has won the right to broadcast 11 services in London, will air singalong music mixes, nursery rhymes, light classics, stories and quizzes. It hopes the radio station will go nationwide if the London project is successful.
Susan Stranks, co-ordinator of the National Campaign for Children's Radio, said, 'Abracadabra is a wonderful potential use of digital radio and we are trying to get digital radio into all state-funded and private nurseries in Greater London. We plan to do an evaluation of our service in nurseries and hope to show how good radio is for the early years.
'The problem with digital radios is they currently cost a little under Pounds 300 per set, but we hope to get lottery or local authority funding to lease radios to nurseries. Listening skills are very important. One in five pre-school children has language and communication problems, and this figure rises to 40 per cent in some inner city areas. We want parents, children and carers to sing and listen to stories together so concentration and listening is encouraged again' Ms Stranks added, 'Children's radio has been ignored in favour of television, but that does not help develop children's listening skills because they look at the images and sound just supports the pictures. We want the sound to be paramount to encourage children to be aware of the sounds and music around them.'
Independent literacy expert Sue Palmer agreed that children learn language through interaction which cannot be gained from watching television. She said, 'Listening to a story on the radio engages a child's imagination in a way that television doesn't. Hearing a story read aloud helps children to engage with reading.
'More research shows increasingly that parents are not reading to their children. It is important to find other ways of addressing the importance of concentration, reading and listening, and children's radio could well do that.'