WHEN teenager Tony Green left primary school he could read and write no better than a five-year-old. He relied on memory and pictures to guess the text in books.

Today he has eight good GCSEs and is a published poet.

With the help of family and friends, Tony managed to muddle through at Star primary, Canning Town, east London, where he was wrongly diagnosed as dyslexic and given glasses, which did not help.

The extent of his illiteracy went unnoticed until he arrived at Cumberland secondary, Plaistow.

Tony’s mother, Julie, said: “He used to cry and beg not to go to school. He thought it was a stigma that he didn’t want anyone to know about.

“A lot of teachers did not have the time or the knack of teaching literacy. They didn’t explain the different sounds to him. I found it very sad - he was a kid in a rut.”

His life changed when he arrived at Cumberland. He had scored just Level 1 at key stages 1 and 2. In the London Reading test he scored just 70, well below the average of 100 for his age.

But he did have a love of words. In his first year at secondary school he dictated a poem to his friends: Feelings.

Feelings are special like a rose in a desert like a waterfall in a meadow of your dreams, like something magical in mountains so far away.

And as I walk towards the long tunnel’s end I can feel all myfeelings again.

I feel sad, I feel lonely, I feel dark inside but now I remember my family and then I feel happy with the urge to go on.

But just then I feel something superb like the midnight sky, like a shooting comet and the stars are winking down at me.

Have you ever seen the mountains when it snows? The snow makes you feel like angels in the flaky clouds.

It took him a term to be able to read the poem to himself. It was later published in Poetry Now: Young Writers Over The Moon.

English teacher Kevin McKellar spotted Tony’s potential and offered him help through the school’s literacy scheme, introduced four years’ ahead of the Government’s national literacy strategy in 1994.

The aim was to combat illiteracy among poor white boys in east London, 70 per cent of whom were below their chronological reading age. Tony learned to read and write in five months.

Mr McKellar said: “It’s a shame this particular child slipped through the net. He always had a talent for literature, it was just a case of tapping it.”

Now assistant headteacher, Mr McKellar plans to submit Tony’s poem about a World War One soldier to Chelsea literary agent Tessa Sale, and publishers Methuen.

Last month Tony, now at Newham sixth-form college studying for a BTec National Diploma in performing arts, won a gold award at the local education authority’s Oscar ceremony for the borough’s young stars.