World Book Day

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for schools, learning and assessment, and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on social mobility. This debate was opened so passionately by my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), Chair of the Education Committee, who rightly reminds us of the role of parents in World Book Day, scurrying around and supporting their young people to dress up in fantastic costumes. One of my happiest memories of World Book Day is of when I was a teacher and put together a fantastic costume of the Cyclops from Homer’s “Odyssey”—I do not think the pictures are still online, so do not try to look for them.

Reading is one of life’s joys. It is a bridge to new worlds, to new opportunities and to new ideas. One of my proudest and happiest moments so far as Bracknell’s MP was having the honour to open a new school library at Fox Hill primary in my constituency. Seeing the excitement from so many young readers who could not wait to make use of the new renovated space warmed my heart. So too did visiting Uplands school in Sandhurst alongside the Education Secretary last year, and speaking to students there about the books they were reading and why they had chosen them.

I take this opportunity to officially wish everyone here, in Bracknell Forest and across the country a happy World Book Day, and a happy National Year of Reading. The Government are marking the event with a commitment to ensure that every primary school in England has a library by the end of this Parliament.

Reading has proven benefits for attainment. It has been linked to stronger writing skills, improved brain development and even higher future earnings, but it is not just academically that it benefits young people. It also has a demonstrable impact on wellbeing, including on confidence, empathy and emotional intelligence. Given the challenges facing young people in our modern world, these are the skills we need to help them develop.

As the Chair of the Education Committee said, we are conducting an inquiry into reading for pleasure. We have heard evidence about the wide range of benefits of reading for young people, and that reading for pleasure—reading what we want to read, because we want to read it—has particular advantages. We have also heard alarming evidence that there has been a 36% decrease in the number of children between eight and 18 who are reading for pleasure since 2005. Only a third of children are now picking up a book and enjoying doing so. We are seeing that decline in two particular groups—those with special educational needs and boys.

There are obvious barriers to reading for many SEND learners, particularly those with dyslexia, but that does not mean that they should not be afforded the same opportunities as their classmates to access the benefits and joys of books, or that they do not stand to benefit from reading just as much as their peers. There are many ways to access the world of reading, from traditional physical books to audiobooks, graphic novels, newspapers and e-readers, and it is not just format where inclusion matters. What international evidence exists suggests that the systemic use of age-appropriate, culturally inclusive children’s literature, coupled with an engaging reading experience, can help build positive reading habits and enhance comprehension for SEND learners. For that reason, it is so important that we support and empower schools to create inclusive cultures around reading.

The British Dyslexia Association, a fantastic organisation that just so happens to be based in my constituency, has stressed that there are concrete measures that schools can take and Government can promote that would make a real difference. Those include funding widely stocked and accessible school libraries, providing training and technology to support staff, and early intervention to identify reading difficulties as soon as possible.

According to the National Literacy Trust, reading rates are lower for boys than for girls at every age, and fewer than one in 10 boys aged 14 to 16 read for daily pleasure. That is an important point. Reading is important for attainment but, as I have said, it is already a joy, and it should be encouraged not purely for academic purposes but simply for fun. It is especially interesting that the NTL’s research shows that reading for pleasure dips for both girls and boys in early adolescence, but recovers for girls while remaining persistently low for boys. That drives the widening gender gap on reading for pleasure in the teenage years, so why do young men not pick up books again while their female classmates do? We do not have all the answers to that, but we need to find them.

[Liam Conlon (Beckenham and Penge) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentions that reading is so important for children’s development and enjoyment. None of that is possible without the work of incredible children’s authors. Beckenham and Penge was home to Enid Blyton, with over 700 books including the Famous Five series, and Walter de la Mare, with his incredible series of children’s ghost stories. Today, we are home to some fantastic children’s authors, including Penny Chrimes and Peter Bently. Will my hon. Friend join me in thanking every children’s author, past and present, for their incredible contributions?

[Peter Swallow]

Absolutely. As we heard, the range of children’s books is growing. It can be slightly reductive to suggest that a single type of book appeals to a single kind of child, so we need to see a broad range of books. We need non-fiction as well as fiction, because lots of young people love to get into reading by picking up a non-fiction book. Whatever we can do, with the help of children’s authors, to encourage young people to find the thing that gets them reading and gets them hooked so that they carry on reading, including a broader range of works, is important.

This is a world where boys and young men are facing unique pressures. They are increasingly vulnerable to turning away from the world and towards the misogyny and hatred they too often encounter online. Hon. Members in the Chamber may have heard me speak many times about the importance of skills in our education system, but it strikes me that this debate concerns the most essential skill of all, which goes to the heart of how we equip our boys to become healthy and happy young men in today’s world—not reading per se, as important as that is, but empathy. Ultimately, whatever the genre or type of book, reading is about seeing the world from a new perspective and a point of view that is different from our own. That is why it speaks to our common humanity.

As we come together as a nation this year to celebrate our shared love of reading and our mutual responsibility to foster that in the younger generation, we must ensure that that effort is inclusive and inspiring. That is perhaps the biggest challenge, but it also holds the greatest rewards. If we can take reading for pleasure as our starting point, not our ending point, everything else will follow.

I will finish by sharing the book that I am reading at the moment, which is “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk. I am reading it with my book club. I thought I would finish with that, purely to point out that no one is ever too old or too young to pick up a good book.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Voaden]

Communal groups where children can read together and parents can be encouraged can really boost a parent’s confidence in their ability to share a book with their child, because some parents to do not feel as confident reading as others do.

Last Friday night, I had the pleasure of reading “The Gruffalo” to my 18-month-old grandson. It was the first time that I have sat and read him a bedtime story, so I am starting again that long journey of reading to children, which ended with my eldest daughter after the fifth “Harry Potter” book, at which point I said, “No more,” and that she would have to read the last two on her own.

[Peter Swallow]

The hon. Lady provokes me to add a huge thank you to all the grandparents, kinship carers and extended family who support parents in reading to their children. In my family, it is often my dad who reads to my nieces and who they run to for a book at bedtime, so I say a huge thank you to the surrounding family who support our young people to love reading.

[Caroline Voaden]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. When I was a rather frazzled single parent of two young children, I remember that my mum would sit calmly and quietly with the girls and read them stories when I did not have the headspace. It was a lovely thing to see, and they developed a very special bond.

This week, we on the Education Committee have heard some powerful evidence from experts on reading. Reading to children exposes them to millions of words that differ substantially from everyday spoken language, as books contain a wider range of vocabulary, more complex sentence structures and richer narrative forms. Reading helps children to develop their own vocabulary that they can go on to use during their school years and beyond. Dr Jo Taylor, associate professor of language and cognition at University College London, explained to us how exposure to language leads to vocabulary development.

There is also clear evidence that reading improves cognitive development, tuning an area of the brain that specialises in word processing. Several studies show that, alongside those developmental benefits, young people who develop the habit of reading in early childhood are likely to achieve higher qualifications and better upward social mobility later in life. An evidence review by BookTrust found that shared reading is consistently associated with stronger academic performance. By age 16, reading for pleasure is a much stronger predictor of progress in vocabulary, mathematics and spelling than parental educational attainment. Compared with their peers, disadvantaged children who achieve highly at the end of primary school are twice as likely to have been read to at home in their early years. Reading is such an important thing to do with young children.

That evidence shows how vital it is for improving social mobility that we strongly encourage and educate parents to read to their children regularly, throughout the early years, and that we continue to push children to keep reading for pleasure throughout their childhood and into their adult lives. No opportunity is better than World Book Day to demonstrate to children the simple joy of reading. World Book Day is a wonderful reminder of the difference that reading can make in a child’s life, not just in the classroom but far beyond it. I commend the hon. Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) for her competition. I love the fact that she knows someone called Liam the librarian—he sounds like a character from a children’s book.

Dressing up as a favourite book character is great fun for children. It is a fantastic way for them to bring their fantasies to life and to live, if only for a moment, the life of their favourite character. It is perhaps less enjoyed by the frazzled parents, and I think that World Book Day has the potential to become a bit of a competition about who has the best fancy dress costume, so I welcome the alternative approaches taken by some schools to avoid that, and welcome costume lending libraries. I clearly remember the horror of, the day before World Book Day, remembering that a costume was needed.

I am very proud to say that my younger daughter is now a professional costume maker in film, trained at a very early age by her disappointment in her mother’s attempts. She would begin deliberating about her World Book Day costume weeks before the event. Although I am biased, I have to say that her costume of Effie Trinket, from “The Hunger Games”, was quite phenomenal. So, for all those parents who did not manage it this year there could be an upside.

Beyond the fancy dress, it is important that we remember what World Book Day is really about: reading. That is especially so this year, the National Year of Reading. The current state of children’s reading in this country is deeply concerning. We heard a lot of evidence about that in today’s debate. Reading rates are plummeting: the National Literacy Trust’s annual literacy survey found that in 2025 the percentage of children and young people who said that they enjoy reading was at its lowest level in 20 years. Just under a third of children aged eight to 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their free time last year—that is a shocking decrease of 36% over the last 20 years—and less than a fifth of eight to 18-year-olds said that they read something daily in their free time last year.

As hon. Members have discussed, there is a noticeable gendered aspect to the decline in the love for reading. Some 39.8% of girls aged eight to 18 said that they enjoy reading, compared with just a quarter of boys. That gap has expanded massively in recent years. It is also important to note that in 2020, research by the National Literacy Trust found that children and young people from minority ethnic groups, particularly those from black ethnic backgrounds, reported that they did not see themselves in what they read. It is far harder for children from such groups to find pleasure in reading when they struggle to find a book that they can relate to, or feel a cultural connection with. This week in the Education Committee we heard that that might have as much to do with the marketing of books, and with the industry, as with anything else.

How do we address the concerning trend of reading rates that continue to fall? As we have heard, libraries are a good place to start. The importance of a child having the opportunity to choose any book they like and take it home for free cannot be overestimated, especially for those who cannot afford to buy new books. Access to books is a key issue for disadvantaged children. The National Literacy Trust’s research found that one in 10 children and young people reported having no books of their own at home, rising to one in six for those who receive free school meals. That is why the Liberal Democrats would fund additional library opening hours as part of our commitment to hobby hubs—community third spaces where people can gather and enjoy hobbies, including reading. We would encourage children to utilise these spaces, providing access and opportunity for them to read more.

It is a sad fact that Libraries Unlimited in Devon has just had to declare that it can no longer sustain the opening hours of our much-loved libraries as they are, due to the chronic and sustained underfunding of local authorities like Devon county council over the past decade or so. I am pleased that my Liberal Democrat colleagues in Devon have just committed an extra £1 million to help libraries transition to a more sustainable footing, although that will have to rely on volunteers as well as paid staff—and it should not have to be that way.

I am really encouraged by the extraordinary response to my colleagues’ consultation, showing just how important libraries are to the people of Devon, who are clearly readers. We have an astounding array of bookshops in my constituency, and I commend everyone in the East Gate Bookshop, Castle Books, Oxfam Bookshop, the Harbour Bookshop, Another Chapter, Browser Books and Dartmouth Community Bookshop—I hope I have not forgotten any.

Additionally, like public libraries, libraries in schools need proper resourcing, and school librarians need training to encourage children to find books that will light a spark for them. Reading for pleasure means that children need to find something that they genuinely enjoy reading, so on this World Book Day I welcome the Government’s ambition to have a library in every primary school by the end of the Parliament. I hope the Minister can set out how the Government will invest specifically in school libraries, including all those that already exist, to ensure that children have access to books and support with fostering a love for reading, especially children with SEND, who may find reading more of a challenge but can still enjoy it.

When trying to explain the recent decline in reading rates, we cannot ignore the recent increase in recreational screen use. Children are being engrossed by addictive algorithms, swiping through TikTok rather than investing time and attention in a book. That is why the Government’s campaign to increase the number of children reading for pleasure must be accompanied by stronger measures to crack down on addictive social media platforms and children using phones in schools. That should start with legislating to introduce film-style age ratings for social media platforms that use addictive algorithms, as proposed by the Liberal Democrats, and legislating to ban smartphones from all school premises.