Book poverty is a deficiency of the working class - but we can change it | Alisha Rose

As our children return from the summer holidays, now is the right time to recognise and address the problem of ‘book poverty’ - something that affects children from working class and underprivileged families in the North East. 

Doing something about book poverty will help us make significant progress in:

1) achieving regional levelling up, and 

2) giving our children a better life and a better future 

And it’s something that we can all do to reduce. But the first step is to acknowledge and understand it. So what is book poverty (otherwise known as literary poverty)?

It’s something that more than a quarter of a million UK primary school children are experiencing, according to research by BookTrust. They found that:

• 345,000 primary school children in the UK receive less than 15 minutes of shared reading a week 

• One in seven parents or carers never read their child a bedtime story 

It is also a symptom of children simply not being encouraged to read at home. And when children associate reading only with classroom work and see it as a chore, they are less likely to read for pleasure.

Indeed, many homes may not even have books, and many children will never see their parents read either. It is a cultural problem among many working class families that can’t be changed overnight. But the good news is that it’s within our power to do something about it. 

The solution, in theory, is simple. Regardless of class, all children have access to books whether it’s from the library, a charity or from a free book stand in a supermarket. But not all children have books at home. The problem is actually getting them to take those books home and to read them, or be encouraged to read by their parents.

That’s where regional charities tackling book poverty across the country place a pivotal role in putting books in the homes of underprivileged families, as well as convicts and ex-offenders.

But it’s so important that we understand the scale of the problem. The impact that little to no reading outside of the classroom has on children is too large to keep ignoring. This is why.

Malcolm Gladwell explains the achievement gap between children from lower, middle and upper income families in his book ‘Outliers’. He writes of the misconception in society that the under-achievement of working class children is down to them not having “the same inherent ability to learn as children from more privileged backgrounds,” and that “in some way our schools are failing poor children.”

But there is evidence that the disparity in achievement is a result of how children from different socioeconomic backgrounds spend their time outside of school.

In Canadian schools, children took tests at the beginning of the school year last September and at the end of the school year in June before they broke up for summer, every year. When comparing their exam scores at the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year, they found that the poor children’s results had improved more than the wealthiest children’s. They had outlearned the wealthier children by 191 points to 186 points. 

However, when they compared the exam scores taken from June to the scores taken at the beginning of the next school year in the following September, they found this.

• Over the summer, the wealthiest children’s reading scores had jumped more than 15 points.

• The poor children had dropped by almost four points.

This showed that poorer kids outlearn the richer kids during the school year, but during the summer, they fall far behind. Gladwell summarises:

“The reading scores of the poor kids over those four summers go up by 0.26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids over the summer holidays, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52 points. Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn when they are not in school.”

Here is how we can remedy this issue. Many of us still have books from when we were children and teenagers, or books that our own children or family members have grown out of or already read. 

If you're never going to read those books again and they're just taking up storage space in your home, please think about donating them to a local book charity that makes sure those books are going into homes where there are none, encouraging both children and adults to discover reading for pleasure.

Post nationwide-lockdown 2020 has seen school children miss two thirds of their school year. On top of the disruption to learning that the summer holidays are for many working class children, this will have pushed these children far behind where they should be academically, leaving a big dent to their skills, knowledge and ability. 

Class-ingrained cultural habits like this are not something that can be changed overnight, but gradually over time, encouraging children we know to read will change their lives. It’s the best gift you could ever give, to a child or adult. Now that we understand and have identified this problem, it can be fixed. But it starts with us. So for the potential of our regions and for our children, let’s get everyone reading.

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