Welcome to this oral evidence session of the Education Committee. I am delighted to welcome everybody to the penultimate evidence session of our inquiry into reading for pleasure, in which we are trying to understand why reading for pleasure has declined so much among children and young people and, most importantly, understand the good practice that can be deployed across the country to get children and young people reading for pleasure again. I am pleased to welcome our panel of witnesses, who represent authors and the publishing industry, to hear about their roles in this agenda. I invite our witnesses to introduce themselves, starting with Rebecca Sinclair.

Good morning. I am Rebecca Sinclair, chief brand officer of Penguin Random House, but I am here in my capacity as president of the Publishers Association, which is the industry body that represents about 150 academic, education and trade publishers in the UK. We are united by a fierce belief in the power of books and reading, that books should be for everyone, and that reading should be a right for all. We are very committed to the National Year of Reading. Thank you for the invitation to contribute today.

Hi, I am Joelle Owusu. I am editorial director at Merky Books, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House. I have been in the role for two years, but I have been in publishing for almost 10 years. Merky Books was set up in collaboration with the rapper Stormzy to bridge the gap between young readers and adult readers. We work with a lot of partnerships and people to make publishing a lot more accessible. We are known for publishing books from the global majority.

Thank you very much for having me. I am Meryl Halls. I am managing director of the Booksellers Association. We represent more than 3,500 bookshops and book outlets across the UK and Ireland, including more than 1,000 independents. Bookshops have always been part of the reading for pleasure infrastructure. We see them as places where children encounter books through choice, enjoyment and discovery rather than assessment and attainment, necessarily. We feel that their role is long standing. For example, WH Smith helped to found the National Literacy Trust many years ago; the BA itself, with the Publishers Association, was a founder member of World Book Day back in 1998; and Waterstones is the lead sponsor of the Children’s Laureate—it is great to have Frank here. Bookshops are already working with schools, libraries, authors, publishers and partners, and we are delighted to be here to represent them.

I am Frank Cottrell-Boyce. I am, for a few more weeks, the UK Waterstones Children’s Laureate. For the last two years, I have been travelling the country looking at best practice, particularly in early years.

Thank you very much. In your view, what are the main causes of the decline in reading for pleasure among children and young people? I will start with you, Frank, based on your experience.

I have not been focused on the causes so much as on how we can fix it, because I do think we can fix it—I would like to put that marker down. I feel very optimistic about what can be done. The causes are obviously multifarious. This conversation nearly always defaults to screens, but there are lots of other things in the way. We lost a lot of accessibility to books during the years of austerity. Covid was a period that accelerated children’s relationships with screens and kept them away from books. There are the broader aspects of children’s poverty—all the different hyphenated poverties that I have come across this year. The one that most strikes me is furniture poverty. If you are moved into social housing as a result of an emergency, it tends to be let void, which means it is literally empty. No child is going to have a bedtime story if they have not got a bed. No child is going to dream that they are going to Narnia through the wardrobe if there is no wardrobe. No child is going to relate to “Little House on the Prairie” or think, “There’s no place like home,” if their clothes are stored in a bin bag because they might have to move again. The general instability of children’s lives is definitely a factor.

My answer is similar. You can obviously see the role of tech and the distraction represented by social media. We are all affected by it. We are all logged on to our phones all the time. There is that obvious distraction. As children become teenagers, that becomes even more of an issue. I think role modelling plays a part, especially in early years. It is so important that children see their parents and other adults reading, as they are more likely to become readers. If they are not being read to, which is the more heartbreaking consequence of that, that is an even bigger impact. There is a point when books in schools maybe become about the attainment and assessment aim and objective, and so the reading for pleasure that might have existed in children starts to fall off, because reading represents something different for children as they become older. Fun seems like a trivial word to use, but it is the loss of fun. Making reading more social again, and more pleasurable as children become teenagers would be a really strong aim.

My answer is quite similar to Frank’s and Meryl’s. The issue is multifaceted. There are loads of reasons. I will touch on role models as well. There are so few role models from early years, encouraging them to keep reading until they leave school. We are very fortunate to have a literary champion in Stormzy, who founded Merky Books, but starting much younger and encouraging more parental confidence when it comes to reading in early years is super important. There are fewer shared reading moments for zero to five-year-olds. The school curriculum can be quite crowded, with an over-emphasis on assessments, and risks framing reading as a task rather than for pleasure, which we are quite concerned about, but it can definitely be reversed.

I agree with everything that has been said. There are some specific reasons, but I also think there is also an overarching, fundamental problem, which is that the story we are telling about books and reading is not resonating. We focus a lot on the undeniable benefits of reading, which I know have come up in previous sessions—we are all very familiar with those—but that is not sufficiently compelling to encourage particularly reluctant readers, or parents who have challenges around reading, to pick up a book. There is something we need to do about reclaiming the narrative around reading, making it feel less worthy and lowering the bar. We also need to provide practical guidance to people on how they can create space and time to read. I will cite three specific things that are connected to what others have said. The first is access. The closure of 800 public libraries in the last decade is a travesty. We really welcome the investment in primary school libraries—that is fantastic—but we need to keep that sustained and also look at secondary school provision and the cost of living crisis. World Book Day is an incredibly important intervention, and one in 10 children will say that that is the first book they owned. The second thing is curriculum, which has been mentioned—the interface between reading for skill and reading for pleasure. That is creating challenges for parents. A lot of the time, if they are reading with their children, that is focused on reading for skill and not reading for pleasure, and there is a lack of time and space in the school day for creating a joy around reading. The third thing is time, and I include technology in that. Lots of people say that they do not have time to read, and technology is obviously a contributing factor. Also, in lower socioeconomic groups, because of work shifts and busy work lives, it is very hard for people to carve out the time. It is a combination of all those things and more; it is multifaceted.

Can you each briefly explain the role that you and/or the groups you represent play in supporting children and young people to read for pleasure?

The role that the laureate plays?

Yes.

Each laureate is different, so it is quite difficult to generalise. For me, this last year has been about advocating for early years. When these conversations about reading take place, they tend to revert to conversations about attainment and school. For me, the early years are the main thing. If you are asking me what my role for the last two years has been, it has been trying to shift the focus of the national conversation towards early years. The early years are everything. The early years are when the cake is baked, and everything after that is icing—or ganache, maybe—candles and helium balloons; it is all fun, but the cake is what matters. That has been my focus—and trying to find out and highlight where good practice can support parents. If you are talking about the early years, ultimately you are talking about home. Whatever else you put around it, the bedrock is home, and many parents have incredibly negative experiences of reading aloud because of some of the things that Rebecca was talking about, where the business of learning to read puts you off the pleasure of reading. We can teach them all the steps, but the important thing is that they dance. It seems to me blindingly obvious that what you do is prioritise the pleasure before you get into the learning. This is something we do with everything else. No parent says to a child, “When you’ve learned the offside rule, then I’ll play football with you.” No parent says to a child, “When you’ve learned how to catch and gut a cod, then you can have a fish finger.” We always put the pleasure first, and it seems simple to me that what you do is make sure that happens as early in life as possible. Therefore, what are the obstacles are to that? The obstacles are the accessibility of books, but also finding ways to empower the confidence of parents and people involved in caring for the early years, and reverse the bad experience of books that many of them have had. The driver of Government policy for children is always freeing up parents to do more work and putting more childcare in place. If that is your driver for children, literally the very least you can do is make sure that the people who are in charge of those children for hours of the day know how to bring this pleasure towards them. The people who work in those areas are often among the lowest paid people in the country. They are also very young. I am speaking as a grandad. In those nurseries, there are people working who have only just stopped being children themselves. At this point in time, that means many of them have had an incredibly diminished experience of education as a whole because of the pandemic.

I think there is an ecosystem at large, and bookshops are a complementary part of it. We know that 87% of bookshops work with primary schools and 75% of them work with secondary schools, and they complement and supplement the stuff that is going on in the public sector. Interestingly, lots of booksellers used to be teachers, and that trend has increased. We know that they can fill the gaps sometimes. We know from research by the NLT, by World Book Day and, I think, by National Book Tokens that the ownership of a book is really important to the agency that a child is able to exercise over reading for pleasure. As part of the school-library-bookshop triad, I suppose, if children are facilitated to go to a bookshop and a bookseller is able to help them choose a book that speaks to them, they are able to exercise their agency in the choice of what they read. If they experience ownership as part of that, it is more likely that they will become a reader. Whether the bookshop is going into the school or working with its local library, those partnerships are really common and incredibly important. They will allow children to engage through pleasure or seek an identity, especially as they are coming up into the teen years, rather than attainment, which is something that we have said before. There is a common concept that we talk about when we represent bookshops, which is the idea of a third space. It is used mainly in the adult space, but a third place is not work and it is not home; it is a third place where you go to be with like-minded people. Bookshops, at their best, are that for children as well. Children can go to a bookseller and have a conversation with a non-aligned adult who is not a teacher or a parent, but someone who can help them through a choice. Bookshops are mainly ethical entrepreneurs. They are in the business of selling books because they want to get people reading, and their motivation and mission is very strong. Taken together as part of the ecosystem, they have a really important part to play in bringing books to children.

For the past 91 years, our mission at Penguin has been: “Books for everyone, because a book can change anyone.” I am in a really blessed and unique position at Merky Books, where our goal has always been the Penguin mission that a book can genuinely change everyone. We like to bridge the gap for young people who might feel disillusioned by reading—perhaps they only read at SATs or GCSE level and then there was a bit of a drop-off. Although we are an adult publisher, we look at children and their reading habits, because they are the future for our kind of books. At Merky, we focus on publishing really bold and exciting, varied voices, but I always say that to find those writers, we have to put boots on the ground. As the editor and the imprint lead, I go up and down the country to genuinely speak to children and young people about what they care about. We need to understand that from their voices and not just sit in our big ivory tower in our London publishing bubble. We have to put boots on the ground to understand what they care about and the kind of books that can represent them. We have our Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, which is now in its seventh year. It has created so many amazing writers, like William Rayfet Hunter and Sufiyaan Salam, who publishes his book next week. It is all about meeting children where they are. If they are into sports or other things, meeting them there is what we are all about. At Penguin, we reach 150,000 children annually through dynamic programmes, where we bring authors and illustrators for virtual and in-person sessions, school events and public appearances. We have found that really does help put names to faces so that people, especially children, know that we care about their reading habits, about bringing them the books that they want to read and about encouraging them to keep reading, and there is a space for them in publishing.

I will talk broadly about publishers. You have heard from Joelle about Merky and Penguin specifically. I have a couple of general points to make. I completely agree with Meryl that this is about collective action across the entire ecosystem. One thing that I think is incredibly powerful about the National Year of Reading is that it allows us to join the dots. We need to find a way to sustain that moving forward. For me, it is about collective action across the whole ecosystem. Publishers are super-invested in tackling this challenge. It is both a moral and a commercial imperative for us to build a future pipeline of readers. There are three specific buckets of contribution that publishers make. Building on what Joelle said, there is content. Our job is to acquire, curate and publish a diverse spread of content across different genres and formats, and make sure that it is representative in the broadest sense, with the idea of creating readers for life, from cradle to grave. The second area is around discoverability and reach. How do we get books of all formats into readers’ hands? It is a combination of marketing and publicity campaigns, author visits and events, which you mentioned, and partnerships and digital outreach. Digital is cited, rightly, as a challenge, but it is also an opportunity. We are finding that some digital platforms are really powerful in aiding discoverability. BookTok, which is the community within TikTok, has been a massive driver of a real renaissance for young people around discovering books. There are definitely pros and cons. The third area I would highlight is social impact intervention. All publishers have lots of different programmatic activity, working with lots of charities in this space to remove barriers to access and promote reading for pleasure and literacy.

Frank, your tenure as Children’s Laureate is nearly at an end. I would like to hear your reflections on how it went. You have told us that one of your most important aims was the focus on early years. Do you think you have achieved your aim?

No. I am going to continue as the ambassador for the specific scheme that we put in place, which is called Reading Rights. It feels a bit like being asked to do a lap of honour after you have finished a marathon. Optimism is the thing I would mention. I think the infrastructure is there to solve this. I go back to what Joelle said about parental confidence; that, in the end, is the key. There is an ecosystem around parents. If we can activate it and de-silo it, it can make an enormous difference, and I have seen that happen. As a reflection, I will talk about one place: the Dearne valley, around Sheffield, Rotherham and places like that. I went to visit and they had a really good phrase: someone who has worked in healthcare for 40 years talked about specifically shared reading, which is a really important point to make. We often talk about reading as a solo activity, but that has historically not been the case. I always quote the bit in St Augustine’s “Confessions”, where he sees St Ambrose reading without speaking, and he’s like, “What the hell is going on? What is he doing?” He can’t figure it out. So shared reading is a really important thing. That is where the emotional bonding comes in and the pleasure is released. Also, if it is shared in certain contexts, it brings people closer together. I have seen reading groups set up for early years where parents who have been isolated by just the demands of being relatively poor are brought together for a moment. They are therefore brought out of isolation. They are connected with each other in the way the reader and the person reading to them are connected. The people watching from the side get connected, too. In the Dearne valley, that went to the next level. Services were connected by what Anita Mason has called a golden thread. They had managed to connect the library service, the health services, schools, social workers and faith groups—the Salvation Army was hosting loads of this. They pulled that together and found this source of strength, and they surrounded parents with that strength. Many of those parents had had incredibly negative experiences, but seeing it done properly a couple of times brought it out. They were learning and being empowered as well, and they were gaining from the shared reading as adults. It is incredibly powerful and it costs nothing. We got very granular on this. I think someone from the council found that it was 18 grand to give someone extra hours to make sure that all the departments were speaking to each other. That de-siloing happened and made an enormous, measurable and visible difference. It would be great if that could happen in the House of Commons. If education could talk to the arts and to health, and if that golden thread could run through, that would make all the difference. It was nothing—it was literally 18 grand.

May I pick up on something that Frank has talked about, which is the perception that reading is a solitary activity? You have talked about the importance of bonding and shared reading in the early years, but I think it is really important later as well—in primary and secondary—because it is not a solitary activity. It connects you with anyone who has read the same book, and if you are in a book club it is an incredibly connective experience. One thing that has been really powerful in the Libraries for Primaries programme, which has put 1,700 libraries in primary schools, is the pupil librarians. They are responsible for the library, and they are the ones who recommend books to their peers. There is something incredible about that social connection. Books connect us, but there is this perception that they are solitary and it is an isolated activity, which we need to change.

And that connection is the pleasure. My anxiety throughout these last few years has been that reading with your children will become like five a day or 10,000 steps, or some other obligation that is put on young parents. In the Dearne valley, it was like, “We’ll have a cup of coffee and a butty while this is going on,” and that became social. That is crucial, I think. We have lost the trusted buildings where that used to happen, but we can still build those trusted networks. Shared pleasure creates trust; trust creates community.

It is a really important point. We know from research that it is incredibly important that children see themselves reflected in books. As a community, publishers are really committed in that space. Earlier this year, the Publishers Association published an inclusion pledge, which covers everything from workforce to publishing itself. Ninety members have signed up, so that is a real commitment across the piece. Before I talk about some of the things that are happening, it is worth being clear what we mean by diversity and representation, and thinking holistically about that. It is everything from ethnicity, sexuality and gender to neurodiversity and so on, so it is about thinking about it in a holistic way. I know you had evidence in which someone focused on the CLPE “Reflecting Realities” report, which looked at ethnic minority representation in children’s book characters. There was real progress after 2020, because there was a real focus. That dropped off in 2023 and 2024, but it is now lifting back up. There needs to be a really sustained focus. This is long-term, patient work. For me, there are two things. First, how do we embed the commitment into the publishing process itself? That is everything, including thinking about who we are hiring, and we need to think right back into school. How do we go and speak to children as they are considering their GCSEs about publishing, writing or illustrating being an aspirational career? I would say that over the past decade there has not been a celebration of creative industries and creative subjects. We are doing work in that space, but we would love support from the Government. That feeds the pipeline of who we hire, which will shape and inform who we are acquiring and publishing. As Joelle has mentioned—I am sure she will talk more about this—a lot is happening in terms of interventionalist activity. There are new writers prizes, and some of the big publishers like Penguin Random House, Hachette and HarperCollins have schemes to support under-represented writers, help them to find a publisher and nurture them through the publishing process. There is also something to be done around demystifying publishing. It is a bit of an opaque industry, so how do we open the doors so that people understand what it involves and see it as an aspirational thing? There is quite a lot happening around work placements, internship programmes and targeting specific groups. For example, in the publishing space we know that socioeconomic representation is a challenge in the workforce, so it is about really focusing and doubling down on those areas. Then, of course, it is about the content and making sure that what we are publishing is representative, but it has to built from the pipeline at the beginning. That is long-term, sustained work.

Absolutely. At Merky Books, as I mentioned, we are known for publishing authors from the global majority, but of course, as Rebecca said, diversity is diversity of thought. It is also socioeconomic background, it is ability—it is really, really broad. We really do take that into account. What I always say is that you cannot have diverse books if the workforce is not as diverse. I come from a geology background. I am only 32, but when I was a bit younger, creative subjects were seen as a bit Mickey Mouse. I knew I had a creative outlet and I wanted to read more and write, but I thought, “You know what? The only way I can be respected in society is to go down a scientific route.” As much as I loved that, I am glad I was pulled back in, but it took a lot of mentors to build up my confidence to think that I could be in a position to be a book editor: “own—and change—the mainstream”, which is Merky’s tagline. At Merky Books, we have the New Writers’ Prize scheme, which is for 18 to 35-year-olds, but it is young people who are reading our books, which is great. That is something that we are really proud of. Having Stormzy as a judge every year helps to bridge the gap for people who do not necessarily see themselves in reading. A stat that the National Literacy Trust has found is that 53% of eight to 11-year-olds find it difficult to find books with characters like them. That is something we are always thinking about, because if people cannot see themselves reflected, they are unlikely to believe that reading is relevant and is for them. It is something we are taking really seriously at Penguin, but also at Merky Books. I would add that the diversity around the books we publish—not the content, but the formats of the books we publish—is really interesting. We are doing a lot of work on that at Merky and Penguin. Hardbacks are pricey, as we all know, and paperbacks usually come a year after the book is published, but we are doing a lot more work with e-books and audiobooks to reach a vast amount of readers who genuinely find holding a book quite intimidating. As I said earlier, we are meeting readers, especially young readers, where they are at. An audiobook is still a book. You can really immerse yourself in an audiobook with a narrator, sometimes music. E-books, on an iPad or a Kindle, are also really important. We always treat each edition of a book as seriously as the print hardback. That is a real way to open up our books to a more diverse readership.

That is interesting. It has had a massive impact, actually. We started in 2019, I believe. We had two joint winners, and then every year we have a new winner. The last winner was Sandy Rompotiyoke with her book “Hallowed Land”. We have also had Hafsa Zayyan; Will Rayfet Hunter, who wrote “Sunstruck”; and Abaka Debrah, whose book “Where Geezers Call Home” is out next year. Every single one of those writers is completely different. It is an incredible opportunity for people who don’t have an agent to just submit their work, and we only ask for 1,500 words. As Rebecca said, publishing is quite opaque. Sometimes you need an agent—if you work at a big five like Penguin, you need an agent to represent you—but this throws everything open and people can just say, “Do you know what: why not me?” I think that is so wonderful. We meet the top 20 finalists. We usually get 1,000 entries from all over the country and from Ireland. We nurture those 20 finalists through a workshop, then we whittle it down and the judges get involved. It has just been wonderful. We went to the Booker Prize last year with all the New Writers’ Prize winners. What was so great about that was that they could see the world open up in this quite elite space, and they were really welcomed. Going there and being representatives of Penguin, of Merky and of what we are doing is super-important, because they are now the representatives of literature, whereas a couple of years ago they might not have seen someone like themselves in that place, so the prize is doing great things. It is still challenging as a New Writers’ Prize winner. I guess that having the Penguin brand and the Merky brand can be a lot of pressure, but we are doing things differently at Merky. It is gaining traction. We get more and more applicants every single year, and our books sell as well—people see themselves. We will see that next week with Sufiyaan Salam’s “Wimmy Road Boyz”, and next year we will have Abaka Debrah’s “Where Geezers Call Home”, which is set in Essex. There is also a lot of regional diversity, with Manchester and Essex, so it is not just a London bubble. It is just a real, real joy to be a part of.

Bookselling has changed a lot over the last few years. We have taken steps, as Rebecca outlined, to measure our workforce, for instance, because all these things are connected. If you change your workforce, you change your ability to source the books that are being published by the publishers. We know that bookselling over-indexes in certain ways. Some 92% of people working in bookselling feel welcome and that they belong in their industry, and 89% of booksellers believe that their organisation is committed to inclusion. We are very proud of that over-indexing in neurodiversity—there are a lot of booksellers who are neurodivergent themselves—and LGBTQ+ is over-represented. In racial diversity, we have a longer road to travel. Our organisation is taking really strident steps to work with an organisation called Creative Access to diversify the bookselling workforce, which I think is really important. Our previous president, who has just stepped down, was our first person of colour in the role. It was really exciting and very moving to see her step up to be that role model for people of colour. She was at the top of our organisation, and she made huge inroads as a role model. Bookselling is probably a bit less opaque than publishing, because it is retail and everyone knows what a bookshop is. Booksellers in this space are very committed. We now have lots of bookshops that have opened as community interest companies or community bookshops. We have several bookshops owned and run by people of colour; they are stepping into that extremely proactively and working with the publishing community. When booksellers engage with young people, they can help them to find books, and it is really important that they are guides on the quest for young people. To give some examples, there is a wonderful bookshop in Brighton called Afrori Books, which is a black-owned bookshop. It is doing fantastic work and building a community in the face of some quite horrific racism. Carolynn, the woman who runs the bookshop, is a force of nature—she is just incredible—and we work with her very closely. I agree with Rebecca about bookselling being very wide-ranging. There is another bookshop in Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, called Next Page Books, that is set up to support the families of children with neurodivergent challenges. They will open the shop early in the morning or late in the afternoon to accommodate children who need quiet space. There is also a community interest company in St Helens in Merseyside: a community-owned bookshop who do the most incredible work engaging their community. They have set up a podcast for disabled customers. I think we are well on the way. There is a road to travel, but we are committed, as Rebecca said, with the publishing community, to working together to make sure that people can see themselves reflected in the books on the shelves in bookshops, as well as in libraries.

I have seen great content, and things are moving and changing. As Joelle said, competitions are fantastic. I have been a judge on the BBC 500 Words competition for years. I am the chairman of the judges of the Children’s Booker Prize. They are brilliant at sparking conversation. All that work means nothing if people have no access to books. I have been working in Knowsley for the last few months. There is no bookshop in Knowsley; there is no sixth form in Knowsley. I reiterate that we have an infrastructure in place for reaching out from the world in which people are familiar with books, to get books into different places, and to people who genuinely think that books are nothing to do with them. That can be done—I keep seeing it done, over and over again—and it can be done at very little cost, and it can work magic when it happens. On the whole, and more fundamentally on diversity, can I say why I think books are a really important part of this? I have worked across all the entertainment industries. I am a filmmaker first of all, now a children’s book writer, and I have worked on big site-specific events and plays. The people who thrive in those environments are a very particular kind of person. They are bruising, demanding environments. You have to be able to take criticism and you have to be able to give it back. You have to have a massive amount of self-confidence. Overwhelmingly, whatever the demographic background is, they are people of a specific type. If you were to list the top 10 books of all time, I bet five of them would be written by people who are certifiably—you know, who have great mental health difficulties. Five of them might be written by people in prison. Some will be written by people who are incredibly poor. Throughout the 19th century, at the height of the patriarchy, the most important books were written by women. Books are the only thing that captures all the voices. It is only books in which all the voices can thrive. It makes it completely separate from all those other worlds, where you have to be able to be articulate in the room and be mobile and put up with stuff. Books are the only thing that capture all the voices. That is why books are crucial in any kind of attempt at any kind of diversity.

Can I add one other thing on this point about access? It is absolutely right that the onus is on us to create the content, but there has to be the access for that to get into children’s hands and to build demand, because it is a cyclical thing. I want to mention Lit in Colour, which is the programme that Penguin Random House leads, working with a number of other publishing partners, around encouraging the inclusive teaching of English in schools. When we did research back in 2020, less than 1% of students studied a writer of colour at GCSE and less than 7% studied a woman. We are partnering with exam boards and schools to help them to teach those texts. One of the pieces of feedback we got through some Public First research was that 33% of secondary school students say that what they study in school puts them off reading. It is about providing access and building demand in all those spaces.

Before I go to Darren, we are running pretty short on time. I am sorry about that, because this is a fascinating discussion and you are giving us loads of really useful evidence that will inform our recommendations, but we have a few topics that we want to cover, so I encourage a little more succinctness in the answers, as much as I am sorry to have to say that.

How can all your organisations—authors, publishers and booksellers—support children with special educational needs and disabilities to enjoy reading for pleasure? Meryl, you mentioned one example of a shop that opens early. Are there other things that are being done across the piece?

Yes, and I will be succinct. Publishers are format agnostic, so while the majority of sales are print, we also have audio and e-books. Digital formats are really helpful for lots of children with special needs. There are examples of publishers doing good work in this space. Every Cherry publishes books specifically for children with SEND. That includes simplified classics, sensory products and symbolised books. Barrington Stoke publishes specifically for those with dyslexia, using special fonts and spacing. There is also quite a lot of work with charities in the audio space, such as Calibre, that provide free audio access for children with disabilities. There is work happening. It is really important that there is the funding in schools and libraries to build the demand so that that work can happen, but there are some great examples of that happening in the publishing space.

I can’t actually answer that question, though I am more than happy for Penguin to follow up in writing, but it is really about all different kinds of formats—being format agnostic, and not just focusing on a big chunky hardback, but also audiobooks and just meeting the reader where they are.

Booksellers can help to bridge the gap, to take the support beyond the school gate. The bookseller can help the families of children with SEND, as they can be a very useful curator of content. As I said, a lot of booksellers are former teachers, so they have the skills. I know a couple of them who have opened bookshops because they felt they could make a bigger impact on children reading for pleasure than they were able to as teachers. That was certainly the case with Next Page in Hitchin. I think booksellers can spend the time away from school talking conversationally to families and helping them through that in very proactive ways, by building that community.

I am going to be like a broken record and say that if children have ownership of books before they enter the school system, they will feel more confident dealing with them, no matter what their mental abilities or confidence levels are. Books are really important for this. For part of the year, I have been working with Sam Wass who is the director of the baby development lab in east London. He points out a very simple thing: lots of children feel overwhelmed. Whatever you call that, they are overwhelmed. Books are the lowest possible sensory input for the maximum return. You read a book at your own pace. It is just some black dots on a page. Books are a really crucial tool. I have been visiting the Wirral Hospitals’ school, which is a special school for kids who cannot find their way through the school system. The power that books and reading have in that context is extraordinary. It is the right tool—always.

I want to focus on early years and school settings. How does the panel think early years settings and family hubs currently work together with bookshops, authors, libraries and publishers to encourage reading in the early years, and what more should be done? I want to start with Meryl, because I know that the Booksellers Association has called for bookshops to be formal delivery partners of Best Start family hubs. What would that look like in practice?

We would like to see some sort of semi-formalisation of that connection, because the work is already happening in so many different places, and I think some booksellers are engaged in those spaces. To formalise that for family hubs, which have such a fantastic array of services and resources for families, would mean having a bookseller at the heart of that who can help to curate and advise. It is about having booksellers embedded as delivery partners because, as I said earlier, they can bring a non-aligned, objective view and advice for those families, and they have access to the latest best practice in publishing. With the best will in the world, if libraries are underfunded, bookshops are probably more aware of the more current publications. We would like to see bookshops embedded as delivery partners to formalise what is already happening. Certainly in things like Libraries for Primaries, we would very much like to see that building on the public procurement best practice of having localised and regionalised provision rather than centralising it, which is what seems to have happened on this occasion. Hopefully we can redo that a little bit in the future, because it is important that those things are delivered. Local community is where the value resides.

As I mentioned, the curriculum is quite crowded and does not often leave appropriate space for reading for pleasure. One of our recommendations would be that the curriculum should provide reading for pleasure, for example, through protected story times, and that that should be monitored through school improvement frameworks.

On the early years, lots of great things are happening, such as the Bookstart programme, in which publishers are very invested, and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Lots of things are happening. The point for me is about connecting the dots. There are loads of brilliant programmes happening; we need to connect that across the infrastructure. In the school space, there are again lots of great things happening. I would highlight the importance of author visits in terms of connecting. You have seen Frank’s passion and brilliance. Being able to connect children directly with authors is incredibly powerful. What more can we do around that? I would build on what Joelle said around carving out time and space in the school day for story time, reading alone and so on. That feels incredibly important.

Frank, your work as Children’s Laureate has focused on early years settings, shared reading and community partners. You told us about the excellent best practice that you have witnessed in parts of the UK. What other measures do you think need to be taken to support families, in particular young families, to read with their children in the early years?

It is completely about activating those things that already surround young families, ensuring that they know what a powerful tool they have in their hands. I would pick up Meryl’s point about curation being important. It is about the right books, the right age, the right time, the right place. What is good about the practice that I have seen is that it speaks with the accent of the people who use it. These are site-based solutions. Therefore, I think you need some level of expertise to go into those communities, to do the training and delivery. The bigger the scale and the wider that is spread, the more it is seen as a utility rather than something remedial. For instance, in Scotland, Bookbug is national—universal—which is wonderful to see. As a tiny anecdote, I was in a library in Wester Hailes watching a Bookbug session, which was carefully curated and beautifully acted out by someone from the library. I visited another one in a nursery, and they were brilliant and amazing—the best live acts I’ve seen, and I’ve seen Dolly Parton. I had a hug from Dolly Parton; I am just putting that on the table. A guy came in—a young dad—who was pushing the pushchair as though it wasn’t with him, if you know what I mean. He saw Bookbug on the wall and the books and he said to me, “I did this. Did you?” I said, “No, I’m a lot older than you.” There was that glow; you could see the beginnings of a national story around reading there, which is amazing. We should scale up where BookTrust is working. To scale up the schemes that BookTrust has in Liverpool, to make it completely Liverpool, would cost about 40 grand. That is nothing; it is just moving some people around and a few copies of “The Hungry Caterpillar”, and you’re done. That can be done. It is a solution to so many of the things that we have talked about.

We have seven minutes for seven questions, so I will combine some and not do all seven. How effectively do schools currently work with authors, booksellers and publishers such as yourselves to encourage reading for pleasure, and what more should they do? That is the general question. I will start with Frank, because I want to know the impact of author visits to schools, and what barriers they face.

It varies so widely from school to school. You can always tell by how you are welcomed. Sometimes they are very prepared and it is curated, which can be deadening. Sometimes you turn up and it is the most thrilling thing. I guess that at nearly every school visit, some kid has come up and told me or given me something. When you talk to the teacher, you discover that is the kid who never speaks. There is something about human contact, especially now, when we have had a period of knowing what it means to lose that. There is something about voices and being there for author visits that is game-changing.

Do you measure them in any way?

Personally? During nearly every author visit that I do, I think, “What the hell am I doing here? I should be at home writing,” and I come out of nearly every school visit thinking, “Wow. I’m so glad. What was I going to do that was more valuable today?”

Understood; thank you. What is the impact of school visits? What can change? What can help?

I think they can be life-changing for children, given the excitement that comes from them. Bookshops very often work with publishers to take authors into schools. I think you can engender life-changing moments. We have bookshops galore: 92% of booksellers do author events and take authors into schools, so it is incredibly impactful. Even just taking books into schools can be impactful. We have testimonials from teachers and pupils themselves about how it can awaken a confidence in them as readers to see someone like them up there doing that job.

The Booksellers Association, in its evidence to us, has said that schools should buy books from local bookshops. What is your assessment of the cost of that possibility?

As opposed to?

Buying them in bulk from a wholesaler.

I think the commercial impact is slight and the bigger benefit is that you are building on local and regional partnerships that already exist, because then you have people in that place, as we talked about before, who are delivering. The longer-term halo effect of that is hard to put a price on but it is incredibly important, because then children grow up knowing that there is a bookshop for them, that the bookseller can help them, that the school is engaged, and that the authors are coming through that route. I think that is a really virtuous circle, and it has a huge long-term impact. It is about taking a holistic view.

That is helpful; thank you. Any further thoughts on how schools are working with the organisations I listed before?

On your question about whether you measure author visits, it is sort of unquantifiable, but it is magic. That is kind of what we have to do: be able to sprinkle some magic. I would just highlight—I know this has come up in other evidence from the School Library Association—the importance of having a trained member of staff who then can work with authors and do that embedding of a reading culture across the school infrastructure.

I agree.

Very good. That is three down; here are the next two questions from me. We are talking about the National Year of Reading as well, which we know aims to address the long-term decline in reading and enjoyment of it, as I am sure you have heard. What is your view of its effectiveness so far and what needs to be done to make sure that it has a lasting impact beyond this year? I am going to start with you, Rebecca, because I have a supplementary for you. The Publishers Association has said that publishers should stand ready to shape the lasting legacy of the National Year of Reading. What should that look like, and what support or action is needed from the Government?

It is brilliant that we have a National Year of Reading. I echo what someone else has said: it needs to be a Decade of Reading. The worst thing we can do is have a 12-month burst of activity and then press stop. We are not going to have the analysis from the research until the beginning of next year, when we will even know what is moving the dial, so we need to keep this sustained and we really welcome working with Government on that. We have to maintain the focus, energy and funding, and we are really committed to working in a public-private set-up on that. Libraries for Primaries is a really good example of that, being part of the solution. On your question about how effective it is, I think it has been brilliant at catalysing activity and connecting all the different component parts across the ecosystem. Lots of great things are happening, but it is too early for that sort of measurement. We have to keep it going, and publishers are massively invested and passionate about doing that. I would identify three things within that: the need for sustained funding and libraries; the idea of embedding reading for pleasure in the curriculum; and something around teacher training on reading for pleasure.

It is about creating a unified long-term reading for pleasure strategy spanning from key stages 1 to 5; embedding cross-sector collaboration, particularly public-private partnerships; and recognising the importance, cultural significance and value of the UK creative industries. Publishing generates £11 billion, and publishers are doing a lot. We take this really seriously, but like I said, we also need a diverse workforce and to encourage children to know that there is a place for them in these creative industries. That is really important.

I basically agree with Rebecca, but I also think that the connections being made across the organisations in this space will lead to very good things. For instance, the Booksellers Association is working with the Reading Agency on the summer reading challenge, and getting bookshops involved in that this year as a result of the National Year of Reading collaboration. Good things are flowing simply from the fact that we are all talking to each other more, and the fact that there is a conversation flowing about how we might deliver more reading for more people.

That is good to hear. Any further thoughts?

The great legacy will be to disconnect reading from conversations about attainment and move it towards pleasure, which will help attainment.

Thank you all.

I have two questions, both on the summer reading challenge. Rebecca, the Publishers Association has called for the Government to invest a pound for every child to boost the challenge and to ensure that there is universal access. How should that money be spent? What will get the best bang for the buck?

I am probably not the best person to comment on the specifics so I will follow up in writing. At the moment, I think, 16% of the population access the summer reading challenge, so I would say investment so that every child can participate—investment in books and content—but it is probably best to follow up in writing on the specifics of how that money should be spent.

That would be great. We would really welcome that. Meryl, you just mentioned that that you are looking for booksellers to be more formally involved in the summer reading challenge.

They would use the same materials as the libraries use and engage with children so that children have options during the summer break to have curated help from booksellers. It is a pilot scheme this year. We are very excited about doing it. We are probably going to have about 50 to 100 bookshops involved, and they will be children’s specialist booksellers. Such booksellers are very often former teachers, so we are really excited to see that—it is a good collaboration to launch.

Is that the key model for how you see that working?

Yes. It will be interesting. We have our own consumer campaigns, but to collaborate in this space with the Reading Agency is a newish thing and it should bear fruit.

Any final comments or burning thoughts that you would like to get across to us?

I have a brief supplementary question for Rebecca. You mentioned BookTok, which is part of TikTok. How confident are you that that is actually inspiring people to read, and people are not just buying books to, say, generate content?

That is a really good question. It is definitely being reflected in book sales. It is worth saying that although it is driving particular genres such as romantasy, there is also a lot of interest in classics, so lots of old titles are being surfaced. It is not singular, which is interesting; there is diversity of choice. Actually, one of the things that is compelling about BookTok is that people share their reading experience and how the book makes them feel. I also think that is interesting. How do we convey to people that if you read this book you will feel this emotion? It is evidenced by the fact that they have read it. I know that bookshops are seeing people come in; they are not buying digital formats, interestingly; they are buying physical books, so it is taking them into bookshops.

Thank you very much indeed for coming to give evidence to us. If beyond the session you have further thoughts that you think the Committee should take account of, please write to us afterwards. We would welcome any further evidence. But for now, thank you again for being with us this morning. Witnesses: Isobel Hunter MBE, Sonia Ramdhian, Sue Kerr and Donna Pentelow.

Welcome back to the second part of our evidence session on reading for pleasure. In the second panel, we will hear a variety of perspectives on the role of libraries in fostering and encouraging reading for pleasure. I invite our panel of witnesses to introduce themselves to the Committee, starting with Sue Kerr.

Hello, I am Sue Kerr. I am the chair of trustees for the Community Managed Libraries National Peer Network. We have about 600 community managed libraries in England and Wales, which are supported by more than 15,000 volunteers. We are a charity that was formed in 2019. We employ a network manager and a regional network co-ordinator, and we run regional conferences, monthly online meetings, training packages and face-to-face advocacy. I have direct experience of a tiny community managed library in Dorset, which I have helped to run for the last 13 years.

I am Isobel Hunter, the chief executive of Libraries Connected. We are the membership body for public libraries across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In England, all 151 library services are members. We connect them so they can share good practice and work together on innovation. We run national programmes to test innovation and roll it out, and to bring funded projects into libraries. We also gather evidence on what works. Through our work we know how libraries can work to turn the tide on reading for pleasure. It is great to be here to talk about that. Of course, libraries have been in the reading for pleasure business since 1875, and the first Public Library Act was passed in 1850. They have a wealth of experience.

I am Donna Pentelow, director for culture, leisure and skills at Reading borough council. I am here in my capacity as chair of CLOA, which is the professional association for strategic leaders managing public sector local authority culture and leisure services, which includes libraries. I have 16 years of senior library management experience. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

I am Sonia Ramdhian. I am the chief development officer of CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. Next year we will reach our 150th birthday. We were established in 1877 to help all library and information professionals to grow their positive impact on society. We received our royal charter 128 years ago and we are committed to benefiting the public through education and knowledge. As the professional body for those working in library information and knowledge settings, our members provide their expertise in a number of settings that touch on reading for pleasure—across public schools, further and higher education, health and prison settings—to support reading in a holistic sense as a whole family activity. CILIP’s focus on reading also includes our Carnegie awards, which are the pre-eminent and longest standing children’s book awards for writing and illustration, judged by librarians and readers. In 2024, more than 40,000 children and young people shadowed the judges, reading, discussing and debating the books on the shortlists. They were in more than 2,000 reading groups, and 82% of those shadowing were in school years 7 to 10. More than 78% of the shadowing groups met in library settings.

Thank you. Briefly, what role do libraries play in supporting children to read for pleasure? In particular, we have heard that some councils have developed library-led reading for pleasure strategies. Were you aware of that work and what impact has it had?

Libraries have got a really important part to play in the whole reading for pleasure ecosystem. Listening to the other sessions, there is a real sense that reading for pleasure is a team sport. There are so many agencies and organisations that need to play a part. Libraries are important as somewhere to bring together partners as well as doing direct delivery themselves. One bit of the library recipe—the magic ingredient—is the spaces; 80% of the population is within a 30-minute walk of a library and we have nearly 3,000 libraries in England, so it is still a very large and incredibly accessible network. In recent times, when libraries have refurbished, they have really thought about the needs of children, families and children with special needs—we have seen autism-friendly design, for example, being mainstreamed in library design. The space is really important, and so is the stock. Libraries are the gateway to vast collections. If you are a member of a library that is part of the Libraries Consortium in London or the south-east, you have access to 7.6 million books, which is staggering. If you are into rainbows or zombies, you will find an amazing book that will suit you, and there are different formats: everything from comics to novels, e-books and audiobooks. What is also really important, to echo Sonia’s focus, are the trained and expert staff working in libraries to animate the space and work with children, their families and their carers, so that the families and carers gain the skills and confidence to do shared reading and support their children. Outreach work is increasingly important for libraries where they know that they are not going to reach the children who need them the most. They are not going to reached by just opening the doors; it is about going out. There is some really lovely work going on. Suffolk Community Libraries has run a library on the beach for three years in a row from a beach hut, which is fantastic. In Leeds, as you may know, Mark, they have library buses called Sam and Nelly. I understand they reached a quite staggering figure of around 10,000 children in their first year, and those are kids who would never have come into the library, so that element is really important. All those things together make libraries a really important part of the reading ecosystem. They are very focused on being proactive in reaching out to children and families, and making sure that it is a sociable and enjoyable experience.

I will pick up on some of the points that Isobel raised and on that sense of the library as a space. Reading for pleasure is a multisensory experience; it gives a space for children to feel safe and welcome, but also to have agency and explore their identities and emotions in the larger world. It is not simply reading for pleasure; it is all those other things that reading for pleasure brings and the amplification by having the skilled staff, the welcoming and engaging spaces, and the wide choice of materials and formats. The design of the space amplifies opportunities for imagination and self-directed thought—those things that are so important and that reading for pleasure brings. To pick up on the experienced staff, as a professional body we ensure that there are multiple routes to attaining, displaying and evidencing professionalism. Trained and competent staff create that space, and they engage with, aid and encourage empowered choices in reading for pleasure and in critical thinking. Real confidence is needed for a child or young person to abandon a book because they recognise that it does not suit them, is not what they want to read in that moment, or does not reflect their tastes or their choices. They are all encouraged by those skilled staff. It is also about bringing reading as a personal experience, and an opportunity to explore and build those tastes and enjoyments throughout life.

One of the things that happens when you find that your library is to be closed is that you have to put an enormous amount of effort in to keep it open. That means that you probably have volunteers who are incredibly passionate and want to do the very best for their community. Even if you do not have trained staff, you will have very passionate volunteers who want to bring in all those groups who want to benefit from the library. We also know that story times and rhyme times are delivered very effectively in a community-managed library. I would just echo the idea of a safe, welcoming space, which we think is the most important thing that a community library can provide.

Libraries are about reading for pleasure; that is how they are structured and that is their mandate to deliver. They provide free universal access, so books are free, and that is such a unique thing for public libraries to be able to provide. We have talked about spaces, but library spaces are trusted, safe and designed to be welcoming and inclusive. Often, they are the last public sector space in high streets. They are located in communities, and the staff and volunteers in those library buildings know their communities best. They can shape the needs of those communities in how they deliver the service, whether that is through stock and the type of book, or through the additional activities that bring people in to facilitate them taking books. That, combined with the professional expertise of the library staff, means that there is sustained access and encouragement to read right throughout the life course.

Sorry, I realise that I did not quite address your question, so I will circle back to that. We have seen city-wide reading strategies in a number of cities, including Middlesbrough, Stoke-on-Trent, Peterborough, Manchester and Oldham. Those are cities where they were focusing on more deprived and disadvantaged areas, and children who would not necessarily enjoy reading or be strong readers. These city-wide strategies are being delivered with libraries at the heart, using libraries as the infrastructure to bring in partnerships, support children to access the resources, and provide venues and networks, very much around that whole life pathway of a child from baby through school and wrapping around them. The impacts of those are quite clear across the board. Library membership and use has risen between 12% and 23%. Even 12% is a marked increase, but 23% is quite remarkable. In measures around enjoyment of reading pleasure, there are 10%, 11% or 12% increases—again, fantastic. There have been measurable impacts on things such as vocabulary, literacy and school readiness, which are all important. That really shows that, in this country, those city-wide approaches over an extended time that bring partnerships together can be really effective, with libraries there as the glue to hold it together. A number of countries have had national library strategies—again, an extended approach over several years to really tackle this—such as Singapore, Finland and the Netherlands. Similarly, libraries have been at the heart of that. In the Netherlands, public librarians go into schools as reading advisers and curators to help the children in the school setting to find books that they enjoy. In Singapore, the National Library leads the whole campaign. It has things such as book vending machines in stations and curated reading lists. In Finland, they have restructured or rethought the libraries as community learning hubs. It is about supporting people of all ages to enjoy reading for pleasure and building that whole community. It has been really interesting to hear the previous panels. We have so many of the ingredients in this country. We have the expertise, the research, specialist organisations, schools really focused on this, and libraries, but I do think that a national reading strategy, coming out of the National Year of Reading, could really pull that together. If it were a strategy that set out that ambition and commitment at national level and was able to be tailored at local level with some resource flowing through to make the wheels turn, that could make an enormous difference over the next five years.

Which groups of children are the most and the least likely to engage with libraries? For those who do not engage so much, what are the barriers to those families accessing libraries, and what can we do to reduce them? I will start with Donna.

There are groups of children and young people who are the least likely to access libraries. We know that children in care do not access libraries because they travel around more than we would like. Children from less affluent areas and children whose parents are less likely to read are also less likely to access libraries. From the previous panel we heard a lot around role-modelling. I think that is really important. If children do not see adults role-modelling reading for pleasure, it does not become a learned behaviour. Time is squeezed—we all know that from personal experience. That is equally applicable to children and young people. The other barriers include the positioning of reading for pleasure as something that they have to do as opposed to something that is enjoyable. There are a number of ways in which those barriers can be overcome, particularly with targeted activities. In my authority, we did an extended summer reading challenge that targeted families as well as children and encouraged the adults to participate. That was incentivised. We and many other local authorities do not have fines any more, to take away the pressure of having to return books on time. With all those activities, I come back to a very place-based approach. The individual library services know their communities best and can contribute to opening up reading for pleasure for a wider group of people. I would also draw on the example of refugees and asylum seekers. Library services engage with, often, the hotels where asylum seekers are and tailor the joining system to enable asylum seekers to join their local library and continue to read for pleasure. Many library services stock books in other languages, as well as in English. There are a range of ways in which library services are actively targeting those groups of people—including children and young people—who do not access reading for pleasure.

I will not repeat what Donna very well articulated, but there is a sense of “What are the barriers and how do they stop someone even thinking about reading for pleasure?” It is about role-modelling. It is not just about the family around the child. We know that parents and carers are the main role models for children and young people, but all those other services can give the time and space for reading for pleasure. It is about having this role-modelled, whether in the early years setting or in schools, including secondary schools. The pressures of the curriculum and of the budget mean that it is something that often gets squeezed out. Schools are often focused on delivery and not necessarily on creating role-modelling of reading for pleasure, yet we know that that can be so effective, as can whole-school activities. A library can lead them, and there can be work between the public library system and school library services, with the expertise that they bring. I have seen whole-school activities such as artistic responses to books and competitions for children. There is a whole-sensory purpose of engaging, discussing, debating and critically analysing how you as an individual and your peers and community engage with a book or piece of reading material. It is about not just the role-modelling but how that gets amplified in other settings. Of course, there are families in disadvantage. If you do not have an immediate environment where you or your family have books, why would it occur to you? It is about the opportunities that services such as libraries, schools and early years settings then provide. Bringing a child the pleasure of reading comes from the child’s earliest years—what they think about and consider—and from their families.

I add that there may not be spaces for neurodiverse children in some libraries, which may be a difficulty. We also find that boys sometimes really find it difficult to engage in reading for pleasure; they just do not seem to think it is for them. You can sometimes get over that by pointing them towards graphic novels and things like that—you can get around it. I would also add that there is still sometimes among parents a desire to keep quiet in the library and to tell their children to keep quiet in the library, which is something that we try and tell them not to do. But nevertheless—I think Isobel is laughing; she has obviously had the same experience as we have. You go into a library and the parents are all going, “Shh”, and we are saying, “No, no, it’s a noisy library.”

Public libraries are focused on the barriers and how to support the children that need them the most. It is a real conundrum. We have been running a project called Poverty Proofing© Libraries in partnership with Children North East, and that has been working in Oldham, Gateshead and Cornwall in three very different settings. It has been trying to get evidence around what the barriers are. The project has involved talking to parents and children who are experiencing poverty to look at the barriers. To be honest, none of it is rocket science. It is all things that we know, but it is really good to see it set out clearly. It is about things like families worried that there might be spend. Might there be fines? Do they have to pay to join the library? A lot of people don’t know that it is totally free. You can borrow for free and there usually aren’t fines for children. Nobody is going to sell you anything. If there is a café, how do you make sure the family does not feel they have to buy something, but that there is a space where they can eat their own food or there is food provided? Travel can be prohibitively expensive for many families. There is also awareness; they do not know that the library is there for them. The awareness thing comes back again and again. Recent research by DCMS into non-library users’ awareness was a big factor. It brings us back to the need for libraries to do outreach in imaginative ways, such as on the beach, on the bus or in Barnsley’s inflatable story shell, which is extraordinary and has seven continents and seven animals inside. It has attracted 18,000 children by being out there in parks and in the street. The outreach is really important. It is important to go out and make that human contact with families who, quite frankly, might be scared. If you are a family that has only ever had very negative experiences of school, the council or social workers, you need a friendly face to invite you in so that you do not feel scared. It can be scary entering a big formal building, the library. On the different types of needs, there has been a lot of work in recent years around understanding the needs of children with autism and related issues. Autism-friendly design is quite well embedded. A lot of libraries now have things like little films you can watch to orientate yourself to a library before you come in, and that has been largely funded through the Arts Council. Also, the book stock and selection makes big use of Autism Awareness Week. Whatever the week or day is, libraries often structure campaigns around them and make sure they have activities to suit that, and they work with partner charities and agencies. They make the most of that to give the strong message that we are out there. There is also close ongoing work with specialist charities, including Share the Vision, a charity that focuses on supporting libraries and people with sight impairment and sight loss so that they can still enjoy the library. Share the Vision is one of our partners, and they provide libraries with training, access to resources and good practice, and with a big yearly promotional campaign so they can reach the children. Libraries really do want to reach people who are not using them. It is exciting when new people come in and use the library, but they know that it has to be proactive and multi-stranded. They have to think about the user’s point of view, what stops them going there and how they can break that down.

In your written evidence, you said that we need to pay more attention to home-educated children. What would better support look like? What concrete things need doing to engage them better?

There has been very little research in this area. We would like to start with better research into their needs. We know that this is a growing group of children and that many of them might have SEND or language issues. That might be why they are not in mainstream education. They might have quite complex needs. Libraries have observed that the spaces are increasingly used by home tutors or parents trying to educate. Libraries want to respond to how they can support those children to have that social learning experience in the library. Again, there is that choice. It is unlikely that a family would have such a wide range of books at home. Also, it is important for those children to have shared learning or shared activity and fun experiences. We would be keen to see some research in that area: what are the needs of home-educated children and how can libraries be used better to respond to that using existing resources? There has been some interesting work around children in care as well. Again, we have seen libraries thinking carefully and having strong partnerships with social workers. They have offered different types of library tickets for social workers so that they can borrow more books. They are also totally relaxed about returning them because children in care are often moving house and might lose the books. Rules around proof of address and dropping fines have been changed for parents in temporary accommodation as well.

That is really helpful. There have been calls for children to be issued with library cards at birth. A simple yes or no: is that something that you support? From your perspective, what is the one thing that would be needed to make that effective?

Yes. I think both Isobel and I would say that it is important to not just give the card but to do something after that, too. Isobel would probably like to build on that.

Yes, you need to do something after that. We calculated that to really activate that properly, so that you have those multiple points of engagement with the child and have partnerships working with health visitors and agencies out in the field, you would need £7.5 million. That would provide each library service with an outreach engagement person to activate that in all the partnerships to make it work.

Yes, absolutely. We need properly funded library services to support those parents at a really tricky time when they have a newborn—to build their confidence in how to read to their children right from day one.

Yes, absolutely. We are all familiar with the concept of nudge behaviour but let us also think about nudge opportunities. You have that card, but it is a very busy time in a family’s life when you have a newborn and in those early years. What are the other opportunities to nudge and drip-feed the idea that the library is your opportunity, and that you can access the library and there is reading and support for the whole family? Maybe you are not confident in reading to your child or sharing books. There is support for you. There is the opportunity of the materials in different formats and ranges of accessibility for all children and young people. It is that drip, drip, drip that we need to make sure that it is sustainable—not just the factual physical or digital card, whatever it may be.

There are some barriers and difficulties. One of the things for community-managed libraries is that they may not have access to the materials in the same way that a local authority-developed library does. One of the things that we are tentatively looking at is whether we could bridge that gap and perhaps talk to the Reading Agency about providing materials to our members. That is one of the issues that they may have. There may also be some issues about the six books. In my experience, six books is too many for many children. What we do is give a prize for two books. Otherwise, they all sign up and then do not read any books at all because six is too many. If you can offer them a prize for two books, they will at least have read two, which is of course important for keeping their reading age up across the summer holiday.

Some 92% of libraries participate in the summer reading challenge. We really welcome it; it is a really recognisable brand. I am sure that if I asked everyone to put their hand up if their child has been involved in it, most of us would. But a third of libraries are saying that numbers are declining, so they have to work very hard to swim against that tide. Some of the barriers relate to cost. The summer reading challenge works best when it is locally tailored. Again, that means having staff who can put on fantastic activities, do outreach work and flex it. As Sue was saying, some children find the words “challenge” or “six books” like saying, “Do you want to go and run a marathon?” Where libraries have the staff and the ability to tailor the scheme, they are able to say, “Just come in and join in with one of the activities”, and children can still be part of it and be rewarded, and they can build on that. There are library services that have managed to bring the numbers up, but I think that is through that whole range of activities.

That has been our experience locally. When we saw a decline in participation in the summer reading challenge, we extended it to run from May to September, we targeted families, so that adults could also play book bingo, and people could read six books or they could do three instead. The impact of that was that we saw 2,500 more participants than in the previous year, when we just did the summer reading challenge, our issues went up by 2% and our visits went up by 8% as well. For us, it was about having that tailored approach to our local communities.

I am aware of it but I do not have any more detailed information on it. I was talking before about the constant nudge and amplification of reading for pleasure, and this cross-authority model takes in the ability to access the engagement to make this achievable. It means that families, children and young people can have their own goal setting, so that it is not a high-pressured competition in the way that academia or school life is a competition to do well and to do the same as your peers. The reading challenge encourages the self-setting of people’s goals through exploration, and all the agencies are working together to make that part of family life in the round.

We think that is fantastic—it is almost the gold standard of how it could be delivered. Newham’s work is really impressive in this regard: they are working with other council departments to reach children, by activating staff in other departments who are interacting with children and families to guide people into the library and connect them. It is enormously successful and it is part of that wraparound, whole-childhood support that we are looking at. In practice, one of the barriers in many authorities is GDPR. For example, the schools have the info about children and their families, and the library would like to automatically enrol all the children in the library when they start school, but it is not able to do that because the schools cannot share the data. That has been sorted out in some authorities—Newham’s GDPR team has managed that, so the library is able do that. The first engagement with the library is an important moment that can then be built on through the cross-working. The Government have been saying for a while that this needs to be addressed, but if that data sharing could be addressed, it would make partnership working within the councils, and from libraries to organisations outside councils, really flow for the benefit of the children.

I will first ask a general question to all of you: how do libraries work with schools, early years settings and other partners to support reading for pleasure and how could that be improved? My supplementary question is for Isobel, and I will dive straight in with that: research by Libraries Connected has indicated that 73% of libraries describe their relationships with secondary schools as “weak”, and a similar figure describe their relationships with primary schools as “strong”, so what can be done to improve the link between libraries and secondary schools?

It is very striking that the same number say “strong” in primary and “weak” in secondary, isn’t it? I think it is about all the factors that we have been hearing about, including the pressures of the curriculum and the cost—in time and money—of schools making visits. Our partner charity, Libraries Rising, has been doing some really interesting work with libraries, setting up panels of young people who work with libraries to co-create activities to appeal to their peer group. That is really good and we are watching its success. Instead of the library trying to imagine what on earth you want to do when you are 13, it is 13-year-olds saying, “Hey, let’s do this. It’ll bring our friends in.” We need to have more activity like that. Again, more could be done on how we can write reading for pleasure into the secondary curriculum and make sure that there is time for it, so that partnerships with secondary schools can start to happen and it is seen as valuable. If you go into a library, a lot of young people—the older teenagers, who are probably 13 to 15—are now using it as a space, especially around exam time. Is that a hook? Can libraries do more? Can schools be more open to that partnership with public libraries and invite them in to better explain to pupils what support is available in the library, in terms of space, teaching and learning resources, wi-fi, power and all the stuff that young people can find there?

Do you sense any resistance from secondary schools to public libraries?

It is about the pressure of time: any relationship needs time to build. Again, it comes back to both the school and the library needing staff time so that they can build that relationship. There is an old pattern: sometimes, there is a great relationship, but it depends on “Mr Wiggins”, so when he moves on to another school, it falls apart and all has to start again.

Got you. Of course, time pressures exist in primary schools as well, yet the relationship there is described as very strong.

By the time you get to secondary school, a child is spread right across the curriculum: they might be studying eight or nine subjects, rushing from one classroom to another. Maybe reading is not seen as a cross-curriculum activity but is put in the English teacher’s box. Maybe something could be done through curriculum design so that reading and reading for pleasure is seen across it. What has happened with university libraries since the pandemic is quite interesting. They are really shifting what they offer to their students. Obviously, they are still there for research and to support the subjects that students are studying, but increasingly, they are developing wellness and social spaces with welfare rooms where students can go to relax or meet up for coffee, and with wellbeing collections and reading for pleasure collections. Some of that is done in partnership with public libraries. That is a really interesting model, so can we talk more to secondary schools about that? It is not just about shoving secondary schoolchildren through the curriculum and exams; the public library can help with their whole wellbeing—and obviously, children who are thriving emotionally do better at exams as well.

You got to the nub of the matter with the description of the curriculum differences between primary and secondary; I appreciate your answers on that. Do you have any general comments on what schools can do better?

Libraries are part of councils, and as such they fit well into the broader strategies of councils. A great example is the Best Start in Life strategies. Libraries are absolutely part of the delivery of those strategies for early years, from day one to those first 1,000 days. Yes, there are more ways in which libraries can work with schools and early years settings, but it is also about parents. The school day is relatively short, so we need to tackle the issue of time in out-of-school hours as well. A lot of the effort will not be optimised if we focus on just schools. To build on Isobel’s point, public libraries are a really good space for studying; we absolutely see that. We are just about to open a brand-new library, which you would be very welcome to visit. We designed it in consultation with children, young people, families, current users and non-users, and one of the things that people really wanted to see was space for study. A lot of people’s home accommodation is shared accommodation, where there is not as much space for quiet study, so the library has been designed with almost 100 study spaces, with power sockets, free wi-fi and all the things you would want to provide for free, as well as 2 km of books.

Taking libraries into schools is important, but getting schools into libraries is just as important. I had a situation last week where five primary school children came into my library in a minibus, and when I said to the teacher, “Would you like to come again?” she said, “I can’t really afford it because I have had to leave the rest of the class behind and I have had to hire another teacher to look after them.” One of the things that helps when you get children into a library from school is that they make that connection. The other thing is that we have quite a lot of secondary school children who come in as volunteers, so that is quite a good way in.

Sometimes it is a question of sheer logistics. Primary school is smaller; it has a much smaller number of classes, even if the class sizes are the same. You have a single teacher looking after the educational needs of a class across a range of subjects, as well as the school library. If they have a school librarian, it is often the teacher who is the link to the public library service. Secondary schools are much larger, and their day is constructed differently; pupils are taught by individual subject teachers. They may or may not have a school librarian, and if they do, they perhaps work across a number of activities. That includes not just reading for pleasure but reading for inquiry and investigation, and supporting not just the curriculum needs, but the projects that you do pre-university if you have a sixth form. It is the construct of what they are as education buildings and a service that is different and might lead to the relationship between them. Also, to the point that Donna made, as children get older and become young people at secondary school, family and parents are often more removed at particular parts of the day. As a parent, you know all the children your child socialises with at primary school; at secondary school, they go off on their own and you are removed from it. That is a natural growth and development thing, and that also brings in the opportunity for families to create the link between schools and the public library service.

We have heard evidence that some library services are automatically using auto-enrolment and data sharing with schools to improve collaboration. Should that be adopted across the country? I suspect the answer will be yes—tell me if it is not—but what are the obstacles? Why is that not happening? What needs to change to make it happen?

As I was saying earlier, it is very frustrating, because some authorities like Newham have data sharing with schools and libraries—happy days, they can do it. In other authorities, the interpretation by the GDPR team has been, “No, we can’t do that.” It is extra complex when you have schools that have spun out into academies, so it is not a single data share. It is obviously easier if it is a single data share with the school and if the library is part of the same authority. It is why we have been talking to DCMS and asking, “Is there anything you can do? Can you have a discussion with the Information Commissioner’s Office?” It is an area where, if some authorities have found a way through, surely there is a fix and a way forward here that would benefit everybody.

Do you think that guidance from the Information Commissioner would be helpful in this?

It would be super helpful. That could be guidance on how it can be done, and then we could pitch in some case studies on how it is being done in practice and the impact of that.

Some of our members would be outside that opportunity because they are not part of a local authority.

There is a capacity issue as well. Many libraries are local authority services, so staff are having to prioritise where they focus a lot of time. If something is super complex, naturally the capacity moves to other pressing priorities.

It should be prioritised. We all agree that libraries are a wonderful thing, but for a young person or a child, finding the library for them is also important. Sometimes there are reasons why the school library is not the library for them, and sometimes the public library is not for them, but to have the closer link, the opportunity for both and auto-enrolment brings real gain.

The impact is not just in and of itself; it has ripple effects, and sometimes they amplify those effects. Where you have reduced opening hours, that impacts the physical accessibility of going to a library at the time that you have available, whether that is after school, with your parents in the evening or at a weekend. If there is less budget for outreach, to make an engaging space and to have well-trained staff, that impacts more on those struggling with the engagement, who thought that the library was not the place for them or did not know that the library was welcoming and free. If you do not have those activities, you stop reaching the people who were hard to reach in the first place even more.

Yes, there has been an impact. I do not think we can get away from that. Library staff and the structures in which they sit within a local authority are extremely innovative and resourceful. They make budgets go a lot further because they fundamentally care about the communities they deliver to. They are having to prioritise keeping the doors open, which often means that some of the outreach—the real added value, whether that is real targeted working—can fall by the wayside for those authorities under significant financial strain. There has been more Government funding made available, whether through the Arts Council or MHCLG. My own authority has benefited significantly through that—through the libraries improvement fund and the former levelling-up funding—but that is super-competitive. It can sometimes go to those authorities that are well placed to bid and skilled at bidding, and not necessarily the places that need it most. We would advocate for a better funding landscape for local authorities to ensure that there is less of the inequality of funding across the country.

Let me give some stats. Library funding since 2010 has fallen from just under £1.6 billion to £673 million, so we now have less than half the funding we did in 2010. If you add inflation to that, you can see it is a very big drop. The correct figure that I have from DCMS about library closures is 276. I think a number of 800 was mentioned earlier, but the DCMS correct figure in 276. That is still a loss. No council wants to close a library, so although closures still happen, the tide of closures is much less than it used to be. To echo what Donna and Sonia were saying, however, when we surveyed our members, 27% of them in the last three years had had to reduce opening hours. Those reductions are often at weekends and after-school times—just the times when children and families want to access them. Fifty-four per cent had also lost staff, and 50% had lost children’s librarians and outreach staff. We have been talking about the importance of those. Twenty years ago, you could really spot which was a well-managed service, which ones had political support, which ones were advocating well and which ones were not. There was sometimes a big funding difference there. Now, the big factor is the broader local authority funding. We have examples of library services that are brilliantly managed and really innovative, with great partnership working. They are doing everything they can to bring in funding and make good impacts, but services are under a section 114 notice or teetering on the edge of it. Part of it is connected with the health of the wider council funding; that is absolutely fundamental. For services that have been able to get some investment, a lot of that is through internal advocacy: having the evidence to show the impacts they can make across whatever the council’s priorities are, securing that high-level political support and making sure that their elected members understand the difference that libraries make. There have been some interesting moves around co-location of services. When councils are rethinking their estate, what other services can you bring in alongside the library? For example, in Stockton there is a library in the swimming pool, which is brilliant. You can take the kids to swim, go and get a book, or join in rhyme time. Co-located services can be powerful and help libraries deliver, with other parts of the council, and really reach. If there was a single reason why library services were successful, we would bottle it. It is a mix of all of those things, but the fundamental thing is the state of the parent authority’s finances.

Clearly, the reason I am here tells you something about what has happened to libraries. We are trying to turn some of our libraries into community hubs. We are developing them into something more than just a library. I am very lucky because I sit on many of the same committees as Sonia and Isobel, so there is a collegiate situation going on here, which is helpful.

Often, when we are talking about opening hours and accessibility, it is not as binary as open and not open. There are libraries and branches that have self-service modes. That means that often children and young people cannot access the library without a responsible adult with them. If the self-service mode is on and there is no access to things like toilets, it is difficult for families with young children and families that have higher needs who need to be somewhere where a toilet is accessible. It is never just the one or the other; it is all sorts of other provision.

Costs, too. On stock, we have seen a real growth in e-books and e-resources. They are fundamentally more expensive than a physical book. Councils’ book stock funds have often not increased with inflation, so it is a like a double hit in terms of how far we can make those budgets stretch.

The Government have announced a £150,000 funding boost for public libraries as part of the National Year of Reading. What impact will that have and how can we ensure that it is used as effectively as possible?

Funding—great! We always welcome that. That is very nice—thank you, Government—but it is not a lot. It is in targeted areas, which makes sense when the funding is limited, but it is only £1,500 to £2,000 per service. If you are a large service like Suffolk, which has 40 or 50 branches, it is not very much for each service. They will put it to good use—I am sure libraries can always stretch money—but it is a drop in the ocean. It is not really tackling some of the issues that Donna talked about, such as the cost of book stock. It is not really able to provide extra staffing to knit things together and reach out there. It is a nice start, but it does not go far enough.

A bit more would be good.

And it is not available to some of our members at all.

As a follow-up to Sonia, the Chartered Institute for Libraries and Information Professionals has called for a ringfenced guaranteed minimum spend on books and reading resources. Can you provide any more detail on what that should look like?

Not in numbers or putting a cost on it, but what we suggested and called for was a raft of things. It was not just that minimum guaranteed spend that actually recognised the size of the population served. Isobel has already articulated how what looks like a good pot of money does not necessarily go far when you break it down. We also called for things to support the spend, such as a national licensing deal that would bring certain formats and e-books into affordability for public libraries, and funding for the school library services. They do such a great job and we did not mention them; they provide the bridge between schools and public libraries, and can play a role in this. Thinking about the earlier panel, we could have something as straightforward and, I think, simple to deliver as a national author database to make sure that libraries can assess which authors are willing to come to give speeches, talks and activities, either in person or remotely, for a fee or for free. Those are all steps that would build into the whole mesh of support. We need to make that support sustainable as well.

Isobel mentioned that libraries sit under the Department for Culture, Media and Sport but they are financed by local government and there is clearly also an education piece to them. We know that Government Departments tend to work in siloes—you are all nodding at me—so is that something that we need to look at, to make sure that Departments work together to support libraries? It is not that just one Department should have responsibility.

Absolutely. There is an inherent tension between local authorities, which are funded through MHCLG, DCMS, which provides the policy development, and the Department for Education. We are part of a wider system and local authorities are very good at knitting that all together on a very local level. However, we would absolutely urge there to be a single point of strategic discussion for public libraries that brings together all those main Government Departments so that we can better navigate the strategy for libraries and public libraries and ultimately deliver the outcomes that we are all trying to deliver.

I invite any final comments, briefly. The Government have promised that later this year we will have a new national strategy for libraries. As we think about the role of public libraries and community libraries in supporting children and young people to read for pleasure, specifically, what should be in that strategy? Let’s start with Sue.

We would like to see some recognition of the enormous effort that community-managed libraries are making to support reading. It is difficult because, obviously, the strategy is I think mainly aimed at public libraries, but we would like some recognition of community-managed libraries.

We would like to see a national strategy around reading, with libraries at the heart of it. That would be a national strategy that could then be tailored locally to bring in all the partners. We would like libraries to be at the heart of that, and would like resourcing to fill some of the gaps. As I think I said earlier, £7.5 million would pay for an outreach person in each library service. That could enable such a strategy to happen, with all the benefits that would come with it.

We would like to see the strategy recognise that libraries are part of local government and therefore part of the integrated services that councils deliver on the ground. We would absolutely like the strategy to be funded and for it to recognise the potential contribution that libraries make to a wide range of Government and locally-defined strategies.

We would like some focus on the workforce. Throughout this session, we have spoken about the importance of having staff with skills, experience, a shared body of knowledge, and a shared set of ethical principles. Whether a member of staff is a member of CILIP or not, those principles are across different library settings and all staff of libraries. Something that we have not really touched on is that library staff should reflect the communities that they work with. We have a huge amount of work ahead of us to actually have the workforce of the future, to make sure that it reflects the library’s communities, and that the workforce can connect with those communities in meaningful ways.

Thank you all so much for being with us this morning to give us your evidence. It has been extremely interesting and helpful to the Committee. If there is anything that you were not able to get across in the time that we had available, please write to us. That brings our evidence session to a close.