Our children have borne the brunt of great crises – we owe them the gift of accessible reading
4 min read
In 2012 I helped create the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
The famous NHS section included appearances from some of the great heroes and villains of our children’s literature. Children’s books are a key part not just of our national identity but of our economy. Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins and Paddington – and that’s just the ones beginning with P – are probably worth more than most industries. We have these vast cultural riches in our national DNA.
Yet more and more of our children are arriving at school without having been read to. Their first encounter with book is with an intimidating piece of alien tech. It barely needs saying that those children are at a massive educational disadvantage. But they’re also missing out in other, more profound ways. Let me explain.
One of the places I have visited on my Waterstones Children’s Laureate (2024-2026) travels is the University of East London Baby Development Lab. There, Professor Sam Wass showed me what happens to a baby’s brain when it is read to by someone who loves it. If you’re a baby life is overwhelming — stuff is coming at you from all sides. That moment when you sit down with a baby and a book, or a lullaby, everything slows down. Life becomes a bit more navigable. You can watch on the monitor the chaos in the baby’s brain calm down as it tunes into the brain of its adult. You can see how the rhythms and repetitions of great picture books tame that chaos. You can watch the apparatus of happiness — of resilience — being constructed in real time, at a molecular level. This is not something simply good or enriching; it’s something essential.
And of course you’re most likely to miss out on this encounter with rhythm and meaning if you life’s rhythms and routines are disrupted by the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis or your parents’ uncertain zero-hours life. I hope I don’t need to remind you that 4.3 million of our children are growing up in poverty.
We have it in our power, said Thomas Paine, to begin the world anew. With that in mind, BookTrust organised a conference in January this year which pulled together practitioners and experts from every field connected with early years – scientists, educationalists, social workers and so on – to share best practice and see what could be done. Because, it turns out, we do know how to fix this. The joy of the conference was seeing people from all those different disciplines swap phone numbers as they left – de-siloing their expertise.
But this should not be left to a handful of motivated individuals. The report of that conference –Reading Rights: Books Build A Better Future – puts forward a vision for early childhood reading and story-sharing across three key areas for improvement: reading for the best start in life; reading in nurseries and schools; and reading for children with experience of social care. It also proposes a place-based pilot called the ‘City of Stories’ that will create a reading blueprint for other regions. There are five focus areas where change will lead to real impact on the ground and on children’s lives: workforce training; policy, guidance and frameworks; access to books; sharing high-quality research and evidence; and multi-agency leadership.
One of the drivers of government policy for childhood is productivity – extending childcare to free up parents for the workplace. The very least that we could do as a nation is to make sure that children in those settings have access not just to books but to meaningful shared readings.
“We have it in our power to begin the world anew.” Tom Paine was speaking about a utopian dream on the eve of the foundation of a new nation. He called it the birthday of a new world. Paine was facing an intoxicating possibility. We are facing an urgent necessity. Our children have borne the brunt of two great crises — the pandemic and austerity. We owe them this. It’s not that we can begin again. It’s that we must.
