Children facing a ‘happiness recession’ says laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce is calling on Keir Starmer’s government to “stand up and give a visible sign that this country values its children”.

The author is holding a summit on children’s reading in Liverpool on Wednesday, at which the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, and former children’s laureates Michael Rosen and Cressida Cowell are also set to speak.

The Reading Rights Summit is part of Cottrell-Boyce’s broader campaign to address the “invisible privilege and inequality” within children’s reading.

The event will feature speeches and panels made up of professionals across education, science, health and politics with the view of sharing best practice and making recommendations to policymakers.

Cottrell-Boyce, who was announced as the children’s laureate in July last year, wants to “turn the dial” on the conversation about reading. “People always couch it in terms of educational attainment and cultural capital, and these things are really important. But I’d also like to bring into the limelight the health benefits and the mental health benefits.”

He wants to “move the conversation, for now, out of school” and into homes and nurseries. His speech at the summit will highlight research from BookTrust which found that six out of 10 parents and carers of 0- to seven-year-olds wish they had known earlier how important it is to read with their children.

“We know that if you arrive at school never having been read to, you’ve been given this enormous disadvantage. Your first encounter with a book is as this sort of alien piece of kit” that you have to decode. “You’re at a massive disadvantage over kids whose first experience of a book is cuddled up on the sofa.”

In his speech, Cottrell-Boyce will also draw attention to children “who instead of turning the pages, try to swipe them or make the pictures grow bigger with their fingers”.

Children are facing a “happiness recession”, which “really puzzles me and makes me anxious”, said Cottrell-Boyce. He noted that children have “borne the brunt of a series of crises” – austerity, the pandemic and Brexit. “These all hit children first and hardest.”

Alex McCormick – who raised more than £250,000 for Spellow Hub library, torched by rioters last summer – will also speak at the summit. “My laureateship began under the baleful light of the burning of a library”, said Cottrell-Boyce. “The people who did that did not know how to make sense of the world.”

Cottrell-Boyce said focusing on literacy in early years takes an “act of courage” by government, because the outcomes will play out “in 20 years” rather than the short-term. However, “it can be done quite easily” – “so many of the problems that we’re facing seem intractable, and I think this is completely fixable”.

“We need Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, Lisa Nandy – and more – to come together and help us make sure that every single child has access to books, reading and the transformative ways in which they improve long-term life chances”, said Cottrell-Boyce. “Put simply, shared reading is an effective, economic health intervention that should be available to all.”