Reading for Pleasure is What’s Needed

At The Reader Organisation we are dedicated to bringing about a Reading Revolution - making it possible for people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to enjoy and engage with literature on a deep and personal level. It was brilliant to read Frank Cottrell Boyce's article 'Our children won't succeed if they don't read books' in The Sunday Times this weekend. Cottrell Boyce looks at a report produced by Unesco shows that "reading for pleasure is the single best indicator of social mobility" and discusses the fact that this seems to be ignored by our current education system.

Further to this, in The Observer, we read that Children's Laureate Michael Rosen wants to banish "boring, government-sanctioned books" from the classroom. This comes at the start of a BBC experiment, Just Read, in which Rosen is placed in a Welsh school for ten weeks to see if he can encourage the children to become enthusiastic about reading. Read more about this here.

Our own Get Into Reading project will feature as part of a BBC Four documentary, Why Reading Matters, tonight at 9pm.