Anxieties about children and reading are not unusual, but news that fewer than half of those aged between eight and 18 admit to actually enjoying it – the lowest level since 2005 – should raise a red flag. The survey, conducted by the National Literacy Trust ahead of World Book Day last Thursday, also revealed a worrying picture of growing inequality.
One in 10 of 3,000 parents and carers interviewed across the UK said they were too stressed to read to their child because of economic pressures, doubling to nearly one in five among those who described themselves as struggling financially. Meanwhile, 20% said they were spending less on books for their children as a result of the cost of living crisis, rising to 36% among those in financial difficulty.
This gap was thrown into sharp relief by sales data for the last year, released by market analysts Nielsen BookScan, which revealed a 15% increase in the overall number of children’s books sold compared with 2019, though that number has fallen back by 1.2% in the first months of this year. If poorer families are spending less of the £445m invested in children’s reading, it follows that richer ones must be investing more.
The World Book Day survey was not all doom and gloom: it quoted government data showing that reading levels rose slightly in primary schools between 2019 and 2022. But success in getting a child to jump through hoops at 10 or 11 is only a small part of equipping that child to become a happy and willing reader, with all the benefits that reading habits are known to bring.
So what is to be done? At a time of financial stress, libraries have a key role to play. A welcome sign that they are doing so came with borrowing figures for last year. For the first time in 14 years, a children’s author – Julia Donaldson, creator of The Gruffalo – topped the lending charts, with five others in the top 10. Libraries are where children of all ages go to choose books for themselves, as opposed to bookshops, where parental budgets, and tastes, inevitably impinge.
The dominance of Ms Donaldson, and her collaborator Axel Scheffler, was not due to a single picture book. Because they have published so many, they have capitalised on a truism of childhood reading: that once a child has fallen in love with a book, they will devour anything else like it that is available while the crush lasts.
This is why the borrowable book is such an important part of the reading ecology. Yet libraries have long been in the frontline of cuts to public services, and those in schools have fared worst of all. While prisons in the UK are legally obliged to have libraries, primary schools are not. The result, according to one survey, is that one in seven have no library space at all. This disadvantage is skewed towards the north of England, where children’s reading attainment at 10 and 11 is already lower.
As children’s laureate in 2021, the author Cressida Cowell wrote an open letter to the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling for a ringfenced annual investment of £100m a year in primary school libraries. Her demand should be taken seriously, as it directly addresses the needs of children most badly affected by the cost of living crisis.
