Libraries and Literacy: On Children’s Reading in the UK

By Poppy Gooch

Every Wednesday of this year’s six-week school holiday, I sat in my small hometown’s local library, and spoke to children about books. I was, alongside a number of other people, a volunteer for The Summer Reading Challenge. My task was to sign up participants, discuss and listen to the recounts of their stories, and distribute an exciting stack of rewards. The programme, which I too completed when it first began, assists children aged 4-11 in preventing a dip in literary engagement outside of term time. As I write this, in September of 2024, the challenge has encouraged the completion of 2,180,034 books across the country.

My volunteering took place at The Hive, Worcester’s largest library, unique in its shared ownership between the council and the university. It is immense, shiny, and gold, and I vividly remember its opening in 2012. During my two remaining primary-aged years, it was my favourite place to be. I would pick up my next stack of young-adult fiction, and sit in the comfy cubby holes of the children’s floor, engrossed. In perhaps the most riveting moment of my pre-teen days, Jacqueline Wilson visited to conduct a signing, and I queued up, enamoured, with my copy of Emerald Star. As I moved into secondary school, the basement offered a warm place to go for my friends and me, where money didn’t need to be spent, and high-speed internet (which I didn’t have until much later) was readily available. Since starting at Oxford, its silent top floor has saved me from several essay crises, and when wandering through town, its toilets are always my first choice (some of the last free facilities in the city, and definitely the cleanest).

There is, of course, a great deal more to say about the importance of public libraries: with the crumbling of the welfare state, and the rapid decline of affordable third spaces, they now offer a substitutive purpose for the vulnerable, the poor, and the elderly. What I have observed of The Hive in particular, is its abundance of resources and events for parents, with regular crafting, singing, and storytelling activities, that cost nothing and welcome all. As funding cuts continue to increase for these vital institutions, there has never been a more crucial time to advocate for their continued existence. This secondary usage deserves its due attention, and I must point you all towards The Big Issue’s article on the subject; ‘You can be warm. You can get advice. You can get book recommendations, but you can also weigh your newborn baby or get new batteries for a hearing aid, take part in a Lego club or go and see works of art.’ (Battle to save Britain's libraries as austerity leaves future uncertain (bigissue.com)). My focus for now, however, will remain on their primary function, as sites for reading and learning.

Before beginning this piece, I examined the 2023 report from the National Literacy Trust (Children and Young People's Reading Research Report 2023 | National Literacy Trust | National Literacy Trust). It revealed that just 43.4% of those aged 8-18 enjoy reading in their spare time, the lowest level since the organisation began their research in 2005. This drops

even further to 39.5% for those who receive free school meals. Fewer than 28% of this age group read daily, again dropping to 24.1% for those on FSM. 52.9% have been encouraged to read by their parents/carers, 58.4% have seen their parents/carers read, and only 19.9% read with their family. Perhaps the most revealing statistic of all is that 63.9% of those with a ‘supportive reading environment’, enjoy reading, compared to 25.4% of those with a ‘less supportive environment’.

When people walk into my family home, the first thing that they remark upon is our giant bookshelves, built into the wall and filled entirely. Our living room contains more texts than most people have in their entire collection, with a 2017 Aviva report marking the average household number as 104 (UK: Book habits by region: Aviva reveals nation's bookish habits on World Book Day - Aviva plc). In my room, I have my own set of literature, as do my parents in theirs. There are two more shelves on the upstairs landing, and an overfilled suitcase of canonical works that I will lug back to St Hugh’s come October. My grandparents’ house was the same; it overflowed with paperbacks, and my grandad used to read several at once. My most treasured possession is a copy of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, gifted to my mum by my nan in 1991, and subsequently passed down to me. When I am asked how I got into Oxford, I need only to gesture vaguely at my surroundings.

I am acutely aware of how lucky I am, and credit my successes entirely to my ‘supportive reading environment’, an environment that so many are deprived of. Of course, the end goal for everyone is not to complete a degree in English Language and Literature, and the world would crumble if it was, but childhood reading gave me so much more than a place at university. I sat down with my parents a few weeks ago, curious to know more about how I became such an avid reader. “We used to take you to the library every week on Saturdays and read picture books”, they told me. “Your favourite was about Disney Princesses, and you took it out so many times that we eventually bought it.” To begin with, we did this at the library in Bromyard, an even smaller town in Herefordshire, but when the Hive opened, we moved our visits to Worcester. “It had such a great selection for young adults”, they said. “We didn’t have much money at the time so it was a God-send because you read so much.” My favourite books as I moved into my later childhood concerned the lives of teenage girls. I read Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers obsessively, and my Dad brought home Chris Riddel’s Ottoline, which I adored. The Princess Diaries, The Chocolate Box Girls, and The Confessions of Georgia Nicholson also cannot evade mention. I would finish hundreds of pages in a day, and once woke my mum in the middle of the night, crying, because I’d finished a series and couldn’t bear to leave the characters behind.

There were two major factors, in my opinion, that fuelled my consumption so powerfully. The first was choice. I was always allowed to pursue my own interests, and a book was never a chore to be completed, but a world of joy that I never wanted to put down. The second was my parents’ genuine, passionate engagement with the texts that I enjoyed. They liked the stories too, and wanted to hear me discuss them. This has never diminished, with my mum and I often sharing the same horror novels, and my dad and I regularly consuming the same investigative journalism. Reading, for me, was inevitable. What was also, therefore, inevitable, was a route into wider curiosity, an expansive vocabulary, and the ability to halt boredom in its tracks at any time.

The Summer Reading Challenge allowed me to briefly re-enter the space that defined me. I signed up far more children that I imagined I would, and toddlers and 11-year-olds alike were drawn to our table. The environment was busy and bustling, and I listened to detailed, emotional reports of goldfish that swam into the deep sea, penguins that saved the day, and even once, the full plot of Hamlet. The rewards, mostly stickers, were well-received, and I left each shift beaming with joy in my shared excitement at these stories. The organisation’s website states that ‘reading for pleasure is more important to children’s academic success than their parents’ level of education or socio-economic status’, and that ‘studies have found that those who read for pleasure have higher levels of empathy, greater self-esteem, and are better able to cope with difficult situations’ (Summer Reading Challenge). Their mission has been greatly successful, and they offer resources, not just to their young participants, but to parents and carers too. Their continued push for literary pleasure is admirable.

At a certain point in my adolescence, I stopped reading. It wasn’t because of my phone, or our TV, or any other distractions, but because of a scheme that I cannot name out loud

without a snarl. In year 8, my school brought in the Accelerated Reader Program. We were sat down at computers, and made to take a comprehension test that, once completed, would give us a numerical level. Based on that level, we would be given a list of books that we were allowed to pick from. We were to finish them within a certain time period, and return to the computers to take a test that proved they had actually been read. My level was high, too high, apparently, for George Orwell, J.D. Salinger, and much of the literature on my Oxford course. The computer told me that I had to read Gerard Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which sat at something like a level 12.3. The Catcher In The Rye was only a level 6.

It may seem odd that I remember this all so vividly, but I remain resentful nearly a decade later. I essentially refused to participate. The book that I was reading on my own terms, Emily The Strange: Lost Days, was not on the system, and so couldn’t be logged. I was not about to put it down in favour of this lengthy, unintelligible, dull excuse for a novel, and so I didn’t. I didn’t take the test, and I was given a detention, and this became one of the very, very few times that I was punished in school. I couldn’t bring myself to pick up another book for several months.

I stand by my anger at this scenario. It is a mighty failure to somehow put-off a child who has been so unwaveringly dedicated to recreational reading. I had everything set up to enjoy my books undisturbed: supportive, engaged parents; ready and available access to texts; attendance at a decent state school with a good English teacher; and no literacy-based disabilities or extra needs. I can only think of how much worse this regimented process must have been for those who weren’t so lucky.

Before writing this article, I conducted an informal survey. I asked what, if anything, made people stop reading. The responses I received were reminiscent of my own life in many ways: ‘I hated the ‘stretch’ stuff I was forced to read - I wasn’t allowed to read YA fiction for a while’; ‘I Stopped during high school. I felt forced to read for the syllabus only’; ‘The curriculum phased out creative expression and everything became very analytical, leaving no room to be able to pursue reading for fun due to the sheer workload’. Some of the responses offered experiences entirely outside of my own, many of them surrounding dyslexia and the horrifyingly lengthy process of diagnosis and provisions. The UK’s education system has a lot to answer for. As young children, we are rewarded for our reading with treats and prizes. As adolescents this achievement becomes a compulsory task, and the element of praise is revoked and replaced by punishment. These policies are deeply flawed, and for those with SEN requirements, the issues are deepened beyond measure.

I am lucky that I returned to books; I don’t know what I would’ve done with my life without my rejuvenated love for both recreational and academic literature. Many have never regained this joy. Perhaps our formal schooling should borrow more from the structure of children’s libraries, where reading is communal, fun, and celebrated, and does not require a computer-generated distribution system, a sternly administered quiz, or the threat of a silent, supervised lunch-time to force us to open a book. We should be reading for front covers, for interesting blurbs, reading because we’ve read it before and we liked it, reading for nostalgia, or because that girl over there looks engrossed in a book, and you can borrow it when she’s done. We should be reading because we want to.

I think it best to conclude this article with some words from my wonderful friend Hannah Small, who has been working as a librarian for several years:

‘In a world where capital paves the way, a child’s feeling of self-worth is often reduced to the obtention of an arbitrary grade, because this funds their school, and later secures their career. Reading becomes a means to an end. With SATs textbooks and career guides, the library service helps children in navigating these pressures, but the heart of the library is so much more. Here, one is grounded in the ancient art of storytelling. One is reminded of the magic in imagining and learning for joy - an integral part of being human. This is given to everyone, for free. At the library, it doesn’t matter how fast you read, or what grade you can work at. At the library you matter, simply because you are there.’