Research has shown that about 20% of our adult population in the UK have very poor literacy skills and that the average adult reading age is nine. (According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's research this is about the same in most English-speaking countries.)

Chrissie then went on to create an advice centre in the city of Manchester where she could explain official information to the general public and help them fill in the baffling forms that they were being sent by our government.

Chrissie believed that if people were asked to sign a legal contract then they should be given a fair chance of understanding what their rights and responsibilities were. If they needed to give medicine to their children then they should be given clear information to be sure that they were doing this correctly. And if they were entitled to help from the Government then they should be informed how to claim it in a style of language that they could understand.

Fed up and frustrated with this situation where the public were being kept in the dark, Chrissie realised that a national campaign would be needed to get the Government and big businesses to clarify the information they were producing.

So in July 1979 Chrissie and her colleagues staged a protest in Parliament Square in London. They took boxes of these atrocious forms and started shredding them. As you can imagine the UK's press were there ~ together with the police! The end result was a mass of sympathetic press coverage and the police sending Chrissie and her friends on their way. Plain English Campaign had been officially founded.

Since 1979 the Campaign has had incredible success in persuading many organisations in the UK to communicate with the public in plain language. With over 35 full-time staff we have grown from being a small pressure group into being the largest plain language group in the world.

We are now consulted by just about every major organisation in the UK as well as many organisations abroad. These include IBM in the USA, the United Nations in Switzerland, Microsoft in Australia, AMP Assurance in New Zealand, Momentum Assurance in South Africa and Hoechst in Germany.