Frank Cottrell Boyce has just stepped down as Waterstone’s Children’s Laureate. In his last few days in the role he addressed two important events. One was the House of Commons Select Committee on Education which has been looking at “Reading for Pleasure”. The other was his farewell lecture.
For the MPs he wanted to concentrate on the fact that it is accepted that there is a decline in reading for pleasure amongst young people. He ascribed that to a number of factors including “screens”, austerity, Covid and poverty – including furniture poverty -“No child is going to have a bedtime story if they have not got a bed.” To try and resolve the problem he has been involved with a scheme called Reading Rights run by Booktrust and trying to “bring shared reading to the forefront of new conversations across early years policy, health, education, culture, and local government”.
He used his Laureate Lecture “The Kids Are Not Alright” to reinforce the message. Booktrust had done a survey which indicated that between 2021 and 2025, daily reading shared among families with children fell to 49%. However the proportion of children aged 0-8 who liked or loved reading rose from 66% to 80%. So there is some good news. He expressed excitement at young ones showing a keenness to read to be read to more, but warned that screen time and inequality need to be addressed to return youth literacy rates to previous or higher than previous years.
Back in Parliament, after Frank (and publishers’ and booksellers’ representatives) had spoken to the MPs they heard from people in the library sector – CILIP, Libraries Connected, the Chief Cultural Creative and Leisure Officers Association (CLOA) and The Community Managed Libraries Association. Regrettably the Library Campaign was not able to give evidence.
The consensus from those who did speak was that there needs to be work across the “reading for pleasure eco-system”. They highlighted libraries as places with space and accessibility and that designs are now more welcoming for people with different backgrounds, including the neurodivergent.
All of the speakers advocated for a library card to be given to every child at birth and for the forthcoming national libraries strategy to be accompanied by (or include) a national strategy for reading, with libraries at the heart of it.
You can read the full transcript of the Commons sessions here.
