Editorial 272
Another issue, another alarming report on reading for pleasure. New research from HarperCollins highlights what its authors call ‘a national crisis in reading and young people’.
It reveals that fewer than half of parents of children up to 13 years old say reading aloud to children is ‘fun for me’ and that Gen Z parents, who grew up with technology themselves, are significantly more likely than Millennials or Gen X to view reading as ‘more a subject to learn’ rather than a fun or enriching activity.
Almost one in three (29%) children aged 5–13 think reading is ‘more a subject to learn than a fun thing to do’, up from 25% in 2022. This growing association of reading with pressure rather than pleasure is contributing to disengagement.
More than one in five boys (22%) aged 0-2 are rarely or never read to. Only 29% of boys in this age group are read to daily, compared to 44% of girls, underscoring early disparities in exposure to books. Only 12% of 12–13-year-old boys read for fun.
Charlotte Hacking responds to the report in this issue, in a special guest comment piece for Books for Keeps. Do email us (enquiries@booksforkeeps.co.uk) with your thoughts too and ideas for addressing this national crisis.
New Platform Launches in Response to Class Crisis in UK Writing Industries
In perhaps better news, a new initiative has been set up to tackle another ‘crisis’: The Bee magazine has been created to fight the increasing marginalisation of working-class writers, and of working-class people in publishing. Publishers New Writing North report that in 2014, 43 per cent of people in publishing came from middle-class backgrounds, with 12 per cent being of working-class origin. Since 2019, the former figure has risen to sixty per cent, and as recent news stories about access to the arts have shown, the barriers for the less well-off are increasing.
Editor Richard Benson says, ‘Justice and fairness demands that people from the less well-off sections of society have the chance to tell their stories, and to get them heard. But it’s also about common sense. Much of the important writing being done today, and so many of the best-loved stories come from ordinary working people. So often, it’s stories from the working classes that express what’s really happening in the world.’
The Bee’s channels include a website, literary magazine, podcast, and a large-scale outreach programme to seek out, and support the professional development of, new writers from working class backgrounds. It will publish fiction and non-fiction.
The initiative was born out of A Writing Chance, a UK-wide programme for working-class writers co-founded with the actor and philanthropist Michael Sheen, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Northumbria University, and produced by the writing development charity, New Writing North.
Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, says, ‘Our research shows that despite incredible success stories from these initiatives the class crisis continues to grow. There’s never been so much debate about class in the creative industries but nothing has changed, and things are actually getting worse and inequality more entrenched, hence the need to make our own reality.
‘Talent is classless. Opportunity, however, is class-bound. The Bee is an urgent response to that.’
The same issues identified by New Writing North will impact would-be writers of children’s books, and Eve Ainsworth highlighted the need for increased representation of working class voices in this article from our archive. It’s another issue we expect to return to.
