Children’s Laureate Urges Focus on Reading for Pleasure Over Learning

Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s laureate, urged the government to prioritize pleasure over learning in children’s reading during testimony before Parliament’s education committee.

The screenwriter and novelist, who also holds the children’s laureate title, told lawmakers the committee is investigating a crisis in reading for pleasure among children.

Cottrell-Boyce said conversations about children’s reading too often revert to attainment in school, adding that the “business of learning to read” can deter children from enjoying it.

“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 United Kingdom has declined sharply in recent years, according to the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey.

Just one in three children and young people aged 8 to 18 now enjoy reading in their spare time, a 36% decrease since 2005.

Cottrell-Boyce attributed the decline to screens, austerity, the COVID-19 pandemic and poverty, including what he called “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.

He urged the government to focus on early years and reading for pleasure at home and in nurseries, with support for parents and nursery workers who may lack confidence in reading aloud due to 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,” Cottrell-Boyce said. “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, noted 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,” he said.

“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 argued that taking action does not need to cost much money because much of the infrastructure already exists, and building parental confidence is key.

Cottrell-Boyce stressed the joy of “shared reading” in community settings, telling MPs, “I think the early years are everything. 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.”

He expressed optimism about the future of children’s reading, saying, “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.”

Rebecca Sinclair, president of the Publishers Association, also gave evidence, saying a shift is needed to reclaim the narrative around reading to make it feel “less worthy.”

Sinclair said when parents read with their children, it is often about “reading for skill” rather than pleasure, and there is not enough time and space in the school day to create a joy around reading. The United Kingdom is celebrating the national year of reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates.