Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce on how getting kids to read can help fight misinformation

In August, far-right rioters torched a Liverpool library. It was a tragedy, says author Frank Cottrell-Boyce, appointed children’s laureate just a month before the riots began. And it was borne of ignorance.

“My laureateship began under the baleful light of the burning of a library. Spellow Hub,” he recalls. “The people who did that did not know how to make sense of the world.”

So how, then, to make sense of the world? How to prevent such vandalism from recurring? Part of the answer, Cottrell-Boyce thinks, is reading.

• Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce: ‘We’re in a happiness recession – we need to address it’
• Millions of British adults lack basic literacy skills – and it’s becoming an uncomfortable crisis
• War Horse author Michael Morpurgo warns cost of living crisis is denying kids the ‘right to read’

Today (22 January), the novelist – author of more than a dozen books including Millions and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again – will host a Reading Rights Summit in Liverpool.

Not so far from where Spellow Hub stands, high-profile, expert voices in the political, education, literacy, early years, arts and health sectors will convene to develop policy suggestions for the government.

Their aim: to ensure that the “life-changing benefits of children’s reading are taken seriously”.

“That our children seem to be experiencing some kind of happiness recession at the moment is not surprising,” Cotterell-Boyce will tell attendees.

“They’ve borne the brunt of a series of crises. Austerity, the pandemic, Brexit – these all hit children first and hardest. I believe that the decline in reading too has played its part in this. But – and this is what today is really about – the good news is that we can fix that.”

The summit comes as the cost of living crisis contributes to an unprecedented decline in childhood literacy in the UK.

Just two in five (43.4%) children and young people aged eight to 18 said they enjoyed reading in 2023 – the lowest level since BookTrust first asked the question in 2005.

Part of the problem is chronic underfunding in early years educational provision.

Cash-strapped schools are doing more with less while spending on libraries has fallen by almost half (47.9%) since 2010. Between 2010 and 2019, more than 800 of the beloved institutions were forced to close across the country.

Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis is pushing families to the brink. Some 4.3 million children live in poverty in the UK, but their parents may not always have time to read to them.

Almost a quarter of parents and carers from low-income backgrounds (23%) are not sharing books with their children before their first birthday, BookTrust statistics show.

“As someone who’s been going around schools for 20 years now, the change is quite startling. Nearly every school has a food bank. The children’s housing is constantly being disrupted,” Frank Cottrell-Boyce told the Big Issue.

“It means many children aren’t being read to, aren’t getting these moments of shared reading and cuddling, connecting, that are so crucial in early years.”

Reading boosts cognitive and emotional skills, a huge body of research shows. It also teaches children to connect – and so, in its own way, is a bulwark against the kind of pernicious conspiracy theories that drove the summer riots.

“Everyone loves a story. The things mobilised people in the summer riots, crazy stories – they’re stories, in a way, aren’t they,” Cottrell-Boyce said.

“But behind all that distortion and madness, there is a terrible loneliness. There’s the desire to belong to something – it doesn’t really matter what it is.

“The ability to recognise real connection – I think that needs to be kind of front-loaded into the experience of being a human being. These moments of shared reading and cuddling that we’re talking about in early years. They teach you what belonging really feels like… about trust”

It’s not just speculation: the science suggests that being read to is crucial for a child’s emotional development. During his tenure as children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce visited a ‘baby development lab’ at the University of East London. Neuroscientists can map the brain activity of babies and their mothers during a reading session – research that shows the brain waves of the pair “synchronise in a kind of beautiful mental communion”.

“The neuroscientist I visited told me: being a baby is absolutely overwhelming. You are bombarded with new information every second moment. Moments like reading, like a lullaby – that’s a slowing down, that’s letting a child find its place. Screens do the opposite, because they speed it up.”

The Reading Rights Summit is about protecting the “space between child and reader”.

Attendees will develop a policy agenda for the government, calling on prime minister Keir Starmer to ‘stand up and give a visible sign that this country values its children’.

This will likely mean additional funding – and an early years educational recruitment drive – but is also about enacting best practices across the country. There is, Cotterell-Boyce adds, no time to waste.

“It’s not difficult – we are not asking the government to tunnel another HS2 or to put a new rocket in space,” he said. “But we can make a huge difference.”

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