Delivering subject content through nine life themes
Children’s laureates past and present are calling on the government to commit to long-term national investment to offer children “a life that is rich in reading”. The letter is in support of a new campaign by the charity BookTrust to highlight the importance of early years reading and to help all families, whatever their circumstances and challenges, become “a reading family”. Life-Based Learning welcomes any initiative that promotes reading, makes high-quality books easily accessible for all and helps children develop a lifelong habit of reading for pleasure.
The open letter is signed by all twelve authors who have held the post of children’s laureate (now known as Waterstones children’s laureate), including Malorie Blackman, Michael Morpurgo and Jacqueline Wilson, as well as the current postholder, Joseph Coelho.
It focuses in particular on the value of young children being read to, saying that reading with children is not something that is nice to have in life but “essential”. Extending the benefits of reading to every family “is simply the right thing for any government to do”.
The authors point to “overwhelming evidence” that children who are read to do better across a wide range of outcomes, and that children from low-income families who do well across the curriculum at the end of primary school are twice as likely to have been read to early on. They call on the government to commit to long-term national investment in books and reading for the under-sevens to support every low-income family in becoming a family which reads together.
“Reading to young children builds bonds and creates family rituals. It helps relationships form and supports the development of the brain and language skills from as early as two weeks of age.”
The letter cites “alarming statistics” from a BookTrust survey which reveal how little family reading is actually happening. According to the survey, although 95% of parents with children under seven know that reading is important, only 42% of children of that age have a bedtime story. Further, only half of children aged one to two from low-income families are read to daily. “It can come as little surprise,” say the authors, “that the number of children starting school needing speech and language support has risen by a fifth since 2017.”
The authors say that families need access to books and activities which inspire an interest in reading, and also support from all those who work with young children to help embed reading rituals as a regular part of family life. This is especially true, they argue, for those who did not have books as a large part of their own childhoods or those who are not regular readers themselves.
Reading Together, Changing Children’s Lives is BookTrust’s new action plan to support families to become regular reading families in the early stages of a child’s life. One of the plan’s four main proposals is to support primary school teachers in cultivating a love of reading.
Life-Based Learning supports making reading for pleasure a priority, building on children’s natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge. As a nation, we simply don’t read enough, despite the many undisputed benefits that reading brings. Nor do we do enough to make it easy and fun for our children to read. We need to give them every encouragement to develop the habit of reading for pleasure so that they carry a love of reading with them into adulthood.
We have written previously about the need to end book poverty as a question of social justice as well as of educational common sense: every child, regardless of their background, should have access to a rich supply of high-quality books and to spaces that make it easy and pleasurable to read.
We have also written about the importance of well-stocked libraries as an investment in our future. Despite overwhelming evidence of the benefits of good library access — more reading for enjoyment, better attitudes to learning, higher attainment — school library provision is extremely uneven across the country, with schools in areas of highest deprivation having the worst provision.
A 2021 report published by the National Literacy Trust charity said that a quarter of disadvantaged primary schools in England do not have a library and that four in ten primary schools do not have a dedicated library budget. The report reminded us that it is not even a legal requirement for schools to have a library.
“What a bitter irony it is,” we wrote on World Book Day 2023, “that, in times of economic difficulties and retrenchment, investment in the public services that produce the best long-term returns is often the first to be slashed.”
Image at the head of this article by Dana from Pixabay.
