Children’s reading should prioritise pleasure over learning, says laureate

The children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged the government to prioritise pleasure over learning in children’s reading.

Giving evidence to MPs on the education committee, which is investigating the crisis in reading for pleasure among children, the screenwriter and novelist said conversations about children’s reading too often revert to attainment in school.

He also said that the “business of learning to read” can put children off the pleasure of reading. “We can teach them all the steps,” he told MPs, “but the important thing is that they dance.”

The number of children reading for pleasure in the UK has declined sharply in recent years. According to the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey, just one in three children and young people aged eight to 18 enjoy reading in their spare time – a 36% decrease since 2005.

Cottrell-Boyce said the reasons included screens, austerity, Covid and poverty, including the kind of “furniture poverty” experienced in emergency social housing. “No child is going to have a bedtime story if they have not got a bed,” he said.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is coming to the end of his two-year term as children’s laureate. Photograph: David Bebber

He urged the government to focus on early years and reading for pleasure at home and nursery, with support for parents and nursery workers who may lack confidence in reading aloud to their children as a result of their own negative experiences.

“The drive of government policy for children is always freeing up parents to do more work and putting more childcare in place. If that’s your driver for children, then this is literally the least you can do.”

Cottrell-Boyce, who is coming to the end of his two-year tenure as children’s laureate, said early-years workers were among the lowest paid and the youngest. “In nurseries there are people working who have only just stopped being children themselves.

“At this point in time, it means many of them have had an incredibly diminished experience of education as a whole because of the pandemic.”

He said taking action did not need to cost a lot of money – a lot of the infrastructure was already in place. He said building parental confidence was key, and stressed the joy of “shared reading” in community settings.

“I think the early years are everything,” he told MPs on Tuesday. “Early years is when the cake is baked. Everything after that is icing or ganache, maybe, and candles and helium balloons. It’s all fun but the cake is what matters.”