On the UK’s first Reading Together Day – bringing families, friends and communities together to share stories – we celebrate the power of reading to change lives and drive social mobility. Through our longstanding partnership with British Land, we’re bringing people together and getting books into the hands of some of the UK’s poorest children – opening up opportunities for their future.

Our research shows that children who have books of their own at home are six times more likely to read above the level expected for their age than those who don’t. Yet one in 11 UK children from disadvantaged communities doesn’t have a single book at home.¹ As soon as the lockdown was announced, we pivoted our long-term partnership with British Land to help:

1. Get books and resource packs into the hands of 5,400 children before schools closed, enabling them to enjoy stories by diverse authors from around the world. Physical resources are vital when 700,000 disadvantaged children haven’t been able to access any online learning. 
2. Launch a rapid response project at 20 British Land sites, with their local teams connecting us to community foodbanks and charities to distribute a further 6,000 books and 3,000 literacy activity packs to the families who need them most. 
3. Create an online Young Readers Story Club for children who can access the internet. Here, some of our favourite storytellers, poets, writers and illustrators are sharing exciting stories by video, with fun challenges to keep children reading over the summer.

Thank you so very very much to our friends @Royal_Shopper for nominating us to receive a huge delivery of books today! Funded by @BritishLandPLC in partnership with @Literacy_Trust and @WalkerBooksUK It will be amazing to pass these onto clients over the next week. Thank you! pic.twitter.com/ukcOZH8W7G

— Nourish Foodbank Tunbridge Wells (@NourishFoodbank) July 1, 2020

Lasting partnership

Our partnership with British Land is the longest lasting business and charity partnership to support literacy in the UK. Over the last nine years, we’ve given 42,692 children the chance to choose new books to keep for themselves, putting them in charge of their reading. 

We’ve also engaged with customers and teams at British Land places to take reading out of the classroom, through fun literacy events in their retail parks, shopping centres and London campuses – helping children enjoy reading in completely different environments.

Together, we focus on schools in communities who need support most, where poverty is high and literacy levels are low. Around one in three of the children we’ve reached are eligible for free school meals, more than twice the national average. 

The UK’s poorest children have lower levels of literacy than their more affluent peers. By age five, they can already be up to 19 months behind in their language development.² Reading for pleasure has the power to change this. Research shows that children who enjoy reading and read often go on to have better opportunities in life.³ In fact, reading for enjoyment is a stronger predictor of social mobility than socio-economic background and parents’ levels of education.⁴  

Our partnership with British Land and their customers and partner schools is helping to break the intergenerational pattern of low levels of literacy by switching children onto reading for enjoyment. If you can get in young enough, you can change children’s lives for good. 

Partnership can transform children’s lives

Teachers see at first hand the extraordinary difference our partnership with British Land makes to their pupils – that transformational combination of book ownership and events that bring reading to life. We couldn’t do this on our own, but together we can. 

Our priorities now are greater action to close the literacy gap between the poorest and more affluent children – which has increased during lockdown – and supporting the wellbeing of children in communities who have suffered most during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Join us in our mission to support the literacy and wellbeing of one million children whose lives have been disrupted by Covid-19: https://literacytrust.org.uk

1. National Literacy Trust (2019).

2. Waldfogel (2012) Social Mobility Summit, The Sutton Trust.

3. National Literacy Trust (2017) Celebrating reading enjoyment.

4. Fan and Chen (2001) and Flouri and Buchanan (2004).