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.
These questions are not about basic literacy but about the habit of reading: the children surveyed spoke of books giving them subjects to talk about; of entertainment and information; of reading helping them to understand people unlike themselves; of finding in books a place of escape and a mitigation of loneliness; of aid in coping with difficulty. “It helps me in learning about what I am feeling. That is because I have a hard time expressing my emotions and would rather not bother anyone,” as one child put it.
