Frank Cottrell-Boyce Advocates for Pleasure in Children’s Reading
The children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce has called on the government to prioritise pleasure over learning in children’s reading habits.
Addressing MPs on the education committee, which is examining the decline in reading for pleasure among children, the screenwriter and novelist emphasized that discussions about children’s reading often revert to academic attainment.
He highlighted that the process of learning to read can sometimes discourage children from enjoying 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 significantly decreased in recent years. The National Literacy Trust’s annual survey reveals that only one in three children and young people aged eight to 18 enjoy reading in their free time, representing a 36% drop since 2005.
Cottrell-Boyce attributed this decline to factors such as increased screen time, austerity measures, the Covid-19 pandemic, and poverty, including what he described as “furniture poverty” in emergency social housing.
“No child is going to have a bedtime story if they have not got a bed,”he remarked.
He urged the government to concentrate efforts on early years and encourage reading for pleasure at home and in nursery settings. He emphasized the need to support parents and nursery workers who may lack confidence in reading aloud due to their own negative experiences with reading.
“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, nearing the end of his two-year tenure as children’s laureate, pointed out that early-years workers are among the lowest paid and youngest in the workforce.
“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 stressed that addressing these issues does not require substantial funding since much of the necessary infrastructure is already in place. Building parental confidence is crucial, and he highlighted the joy of “shared reading” within community environments.
“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.”
Expressing optimism about the future of children’s reading, Cottrell-Boyce said,
“I think we can fix it. It seems to me blindingly obvious that what we do is prioritise the pleasure before we get into learning.
This is something we do with everything else. No parent says to a child, ‘When you’ve learned the offside rule then I will play football with you’. We always put the pleasure first. It seems simple to me that what you do is you make sure that happens as early in life as possible.”
Publishers Association Calls for a Shift in Reading Narrative
Also providing evidence to MPs was Rebecca Sinclair, president of the Publishers Association, who advocated for a change in how reading is perceived, aiming to make it feel less “worthy” and more enjoyable.
She noted that when parents read with their children, the focus is often on developing reading skills rather than fostering enjoyment. Sinclair also mentioned that the school day does not allow sufficient time and space to cultivate a love of reading.
The UK is currently observing the national year of reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust, aimed at reversing the decline in reading for pleasure among young people.
