20 September 2022
If there was one good thing to come out of lockdowns, it was improved book sales and rates of reading, especially among children. A survey of 70,000 children and young people by the National Literacy Trust, however, has found this gain is now gone: figures are now equal to just before the pandemic, when the trust recorded the lowest levels of reading enjoyment (just under 50%) since it first asked the question 17 years ago. A concurrent study of 8,000 five- to eight-year-olds found that nearly one in five did not have a book at home.
Read here. The last line of the article states: Compared with other problems this country faces, providing varied reading material is relatively straightforward to fix. We owe it to children to do so.
