Written evidence by Elibraries for Schools (RFP0128)
Education Committee
Reading for Pleasure inquiry
BACKGROUND
This submission is made by the charity Elibraries for Schools. We provide overlay ebook libraries to primary schools in Britain. We also campaign for the establishment of a National Digital Children’s Library. Our submission is grounded in our own experience of running pilot elibraries with primary schools, our own research through freedom of information requests, and our knowledge of research done by other organisations in this area.
SUMMARY
Our response contributes to the following questions:
The essential summary of our response is that our experience shows that digital books are a powerful and under-utilised tool for increasing reading for pleasure. School library provision is very varied, with schools in the most deprived areas typically having the worst provision. Those are also the areas where public library provision is weakest too. A digital library represents a cost-effective way to get new reading material in front of children, and our own pilot experience shows that it can drive a big uptake in reading for pleasure.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Our recommendations are summarised below.
INTRODUCTION
The following section looks at each of the questions we are addressing in turn and ends with our recommendations for that area.
[1] What are the benefits of different forms of reading and what can be done to increase the availability of reading materials that are attractive?
What are the benefits of different forms of reading? We assume this question refers to the benefits of different available formats of reading (physical, ebook, audiobooks). It is important to understand that when we compare physical and digital books, we are referring to a difference in format only – so the same text and pictures delivered either through paper or through a screen: we are not referring to interactive digital products.
Digital and physical books are not perfect substitutes for all child readers. Arguably digital books are superior since they can do the same job as physical books but have additional benefits. The ability to change the font size and background colour can support readers with specific issues (e.g. dyslexia) and the option of adding a readover to an ebook can support poor readers in class. Digital books are useful for children from less literate homes where reading books may be stigmatised. As they are location independent digital books have access benefits - to children who can’t get to a library and for reading outside school hours and term time. Digital books can also meet the needs of the herd: publishers are increasingly providing digital licences that allow a set number of reads to be used up simultaneously as well as consecutively, allowing children to ride trends together.
Digital books are not always the answer. Since they do not have the tactile quality of paper books, for very young children (e.g. preschool) the concept of books may be better learned through physical objects. Physical books are also better when children without access to a wide format device are reading picture-based texts - where pictures are an integral part of the story, a smartphone cannot really be used.
What can be done to increase the availability of reading materials that are attractive? The key words in this question are (i) increase (ii) availability, (iii) attractive. By increase, we assume here you mean more resources – so a higher quantity of books. By availability we assume you mean being able to obtain books, and this requires not only that books are there to be borrowed but that the child readers can access them. We assume by attractive you mean books children want to read, i.e. those they would choose to read of their own volition in their own time, the very definition of reading for pleasure. Our comments are below.
Quantity. To increase the number of books that could be borrowed by child readers above the current level government could increase spend and put more physical books in schools. This would be costly. The most cost-efficient way to increase the quantity and/or breadth of books available to children and young people is to invest in a central digital library – a National Digital Children’s Library. We have written a policy paper outlining the efficiency benefits of such an approach which we can supply to the Education Select Committee if useful, but in summary the argument is as follows.
A centralised library needs fewer books per head of population to offer the same choice as a set of individual libraries. This translates into books spending less time unread on shelves and a lower cost per read. This cost efficiency can be extracted and be used to increase the quantity of books available or to widen the range.
Physical libraries are limited in their reach to the travel distance of their customers. This is one reason why schools have their own physical libraries. Digital libraries are not - ebooks and eaudiobooks are completely location independent and so the perfect candidate for a completely centralised library. This is why schools should not invest individually in digital books – a centralised shared service makes much more economic sense.
The case for a centralised digital library is further supported by the licensing model currently in use. Digital books are not bought outright – they are offered under licence. A book under a ‘one copy one use licence’ acts like a physical book – it can be borrowed by one user, returned and only then borrowed by another. Digital books may be offered under a ‘metered access’ licence which limits the period of time available (e.g. 2 years) or a maximum block of reads (making both the minimum and maximum cost per read clear). For ebooks offered on metered access licences, sharing across the widest audience gives more opportunity to fully use up these licence allowances: instead of lots of partly used licences, a central library can have fewer fully used up licences. This minimises the number of licences that need to be bought and so minimises the cost per read.
A national solution has the additional benefit of providing all children with the same resources and so makes the biggest difference to those currently with the fewest resources.
Availability. For children to be able to read the books provided they must be able to get them in their hands. For physical books that means a trip to the public library or the school library. Access problems associated with the public library are dealt with in question [5], and they effectively mean that only a subset of children has access to the public library’s physical and digital books.
There are also access problems for school libraries (when they exist). Anecdotal evidence from our pilot schools highlights the difficulty in doing a class visit to the school library, particularly for younger pupils; a half hour slot was not enough time to get 30 children into the library never mind choosing books and reading them.
Digital books can be accessed 24/7 regardless of location. In the classroom this saves time and allows teachers to spend all their attention on helping children find a book they want to read. At home – be that on the evenings, at weekends, in the holidays – children can always have access to quality literature. Auto return means those books are not lost from the system, or a child locked out from borrowing.
Attractiveness Attractiveness is about selection: are schools and public libraries selecting the books children want to read and enough of them that they can read them when they want to? Anecdotal evidence in numerous reports (e.g. by the NLT, BookTrust) suggests that in schools there is a problem with the range of books for children. Schools argue that children want to read books where they can see themselves reflected but report that their books are out of date and do not reflect the audiences reading them.
This problem with range in schools may reflect money, an inability to invest in up-to-date books. However, we believe this may also be an issue here over how books are selected, with a lack of expertise.
In an ideal world how would we want our schools to be selecting books? We would hope they would be looking at data on previous borrowings to inform on what to buy. But many don’t even have library management systems at all so don’t have numerical data on what has been borrowed and what has not. At the least we’d expect some expertise. But qualified librarians in primary schools seem to be a rarity. Class teachers seem to be making the buying decisions and seem to be relying on supplier suggestions. Our pilot schools who suggested books they might like in their digital library simply sent us booklists produced by external bodies such as the School Reading List (a commercial supplier of books), Books for Topics (who partner with the commercial supplier Peters) and Empathy Lab. We do know that book suppliers – such as Peters – market book packs of the latest titles to schools; Peters’ website is stuffed full of book packs and curated lists. Such advice is profit rather than reader driven. We also know that agencies like the National Literacy Trust - who are providing books through their Libraries for Primaries programme – start with the lists of books publishers want to sell them.
When it comes to public libraries selecting books for children, we know they are relying on suppliers to select their range. We made FOI requests to public libraries asking them who chooses the children’s books in their collections. Overwhelmingly the response was ‘supplier selection’, be that for digital or physical books. Many libraries did say that they provided criteria to the suppliers to guide them in their selection, but it is unclear the balance between what the suppliers want to sell and those criteria. For digital books this process was described to us as follows
‘E and eaudio books are purchased by standing order through specialist digital format library suppliers. A standing order is a supplier curated list of newly published titles, sometimes based on a particular genre or aimed at a specific audience e.g. under-fives, which is available to purchase to enhance library collections. Library staff work with suppliers to determine the quantity, frequency and spend they would like to purchase items on a standing order plan. Some ad hoc spending takes place so that reservations, stock suggestions and promotional campaigns can be responded to.’ [Leicestershire CC]
Why do public libraries rely on supplier selection? One might assume that public libraries have qualified children’s librarians making these purchasing decisions. Responses to our FOI requests suggests this may not be the case – not one specified that qualified children’s librarians selected the books for children. One might also expect that when choosing new books to buy, public libraries would make some assessment of the success of their previous purchasing decisions as well as value for money and adapt accordingly. In our FOI requests popularity (and lack of) was mentioned by some libraries in allocating shelf space for new books. No library mentioned cost per read as a factor for selecting books. When we asked how many of their physical books and digital books had not been borrowed at all in 2024, the overwhelming response was that this was not data they collected. This lack of interest in data may reflect a lack of expertise in data analysis.
Recommendations
We recommend investing in a National Digital Children’s library which offers best value for money for increasing both the quantity and access to reading materials. The provision of such a library could be accelerated by combining all the digital books aimed at children currently in public libraries.
We also recommend a more joined up approach to selecting books for reading for pleasure be adopted. Children and teachers need to be in dialogue with public library services about what they want to read. Library services need to be looking at what children are actually reading and not reading, to help inform where to spend the money. Libraries and schools should stop buying book lists selected by suppliers – this first and foremost serves the commercial interest of the suppliers themselves – and select books based on the preferences of their readers. We need to engage the help of experts in children’s literature to select books for library services; these may be super reader teachers, charities (CLPE, Booktrust), as well as specialist children’s librarians. To promote diversity, central government could maintain a core book list that reflect current thinking - diverse books to reflect our diverse demographic – for libraries to supply. We should also create mechanisms for local preferences to feed into the selection process so that teachers and children can help to select the books bought by their public library.
[2] What factors are causing the decline in reading for pleasure & how can this decline be reversed?
Factors causing the decline in reading for pleasure What changes are correlated with this decline in reading for pleasure? Why might those changes have had a negative causal effect on reading for pleasure?
Do children have access to fewer reading materials than before and is this behind the drop in reading for pleasure? We don’t know how many books parents are buying compared to ten years ago. We do not have quantitative data on whether more children have fewer books at home than before. We do know that the cost-of-living crisis has left less spare money for spending on everything, including books. Qualitative data tells us that only a subset of children have books at home. Reports by such as those written by the NLT have shown that some children do not own any books at all.
Evidence to support this case is qualitative only in relation to schools. A number of reports from organisation such as BookTrust and The NLT have shown that there is a problem with the range and up to dateness of the books offered in schools. We have no quantitative data on what books schools have or how many they are buying each year. We also don’t have data on how much schools are spending on books as this money is not ring fenced: even if we look at school funding overall, we don’t know what proportion is going on books and how that has changed over the years.
Glossing over access issues, quantitative evidence to support this case in relation to public libraries is also limited. There are various sources of data on library lending of children’s books, including that collected by CIPFA and the Public Lending Right data collected by the British Library. It isn’t clear, though, how far that data is being used to analyse reading for pleasure.
Attractiveness Do children have access to lower quality reading materials than before and is this behind the drop in reading for pleasure? Are schools worse now at selecting books than they were before? Is the selection poor because once relevant stock is now out of date for the new cohort of readers? Is this because there has been a fall in the number of experts - qualified children’s librarians and/or reader teachers – who can match books to readers and choose the right books for their own school libraries? Again, we have no quantitative analysis to rely on: we don’t know what books are in primary schools and whether they map well to the audience we want to read them. Anecdotal evidence from schools suggests expertise in children’s literature in schools may be an issue due to the absence of a qualified school librarians and loss of experienced teachers, but we do not have figures for this. We do know that the provision of school library services (SLS) has fallen.
Are libraries worse now at selecting books than they were before? Again, we don’t have quantitative data assessing how well matched are library books to their specific audiences. Qualitative evidence does suggest that there might be less expertise around to select books, as libraries make more use of volunteers rather than qualified librarians. However, we also know that there has been centralisation of buying as libraries have formed different consortia and this may have improved access to experts and the quality of selection overall.
Access Is access to quality reading materials worse than a decade ago? Anecdotal evidence reported by organisation such as BookTrust and the NLT suggest that when schools have dedicated libraries, access to them can be limited due to staffing issues. Anecdotal evidence reports the closing of public libraries as well as the limiting of opening hours. If this has had an impact on access for the subset of children whose parents take them to public libraries, then we would expect to see fewer library visits by children and a lower number of active members than a decade ago
How can we reverse the decline in reading for pleasure The first step in reversing the decline in reading for pleasure should be to better understand what is going on now. We need a better idea of what is currently supplied, how it meets the needs of children and where the holes are AND we need to monitor reading patterns so we can react quickly to need. In short, we need to be much better at collecting data and comparing it over time. Current knowledge on book provision and reading for pleasure in schools is qualitative and small scale. It is difficult to know where and how to invest in books without knowing what actually exists at the moment. How many qualified librarians do schools have access too? How many teachers are reader teachers? Is there expert knowledge on children’s literature in schools?
Recommendations
We recommend investing in a centralised annual data collection and a central team to analyse that data, to build a picture of what book resources for children, how well they are used and how that use is changing. This should look at books for children across schools as well as those available in public libraries (for which some data is currently collected by the Arts Council, CIPFA and the British Library (via the PLR)). This will give both a nationwide and regional picture of activity. This information can be used to inform purchase decisions and to assess the effectiveness of reading interventions.
We also recommend surveying schools to see what proportion have access to a qualified children’s librarian and/or reader teachers. If the picture is poor – as we suspect – teachers should be given training in children’s literature (as supplied by the Open University Reading for Pleasure Group), and schools given access to qualified librarians.
[3] What is the importance of school libraries for children reading for pleasure?
Access to books outside school is limited. Whilst the resources of public libraries are theoretically available to all, in practice only children with parents who are able and willing to take their children to visit have access.
Our pilot schools tell us that it is the children whose parents do not access public libraries that need school libraries the most. Illiterate and/or uneducated parents, parents that do not speak English, parents short of time and/or resources do not take their children to public libraries.
Schools are the only mechanism where children can escape parental background and only through schools can all children get equal access to books. For this reason, school libraries are crucial to reading for pleasure.
It is worth noting, though, that school libraries need not be limited to onsite physical books: since digital books are location independent it is possible for schools to act as the entry point to any digital library. This could be the digital books from their local public library, or indeed a national digital children’s library.
Recommendations:
We recommend that schools be given the power to register their pupils with the local library independently of parents.
We also reiterate our recommendation from question [1] that government invest in a National Digital Children’s library.
[4] How does the school curriculum encourage, or discourage, children to read for pleasure and how could this be improved?
Whilst RfP has always been included in the curriculum it is only judged qualitatively by Ofsted: as we understand it there is no test or metric for reading for pleasure and schools are not required to produce quantitative evidence.
Our experience with our pilot schools has shown that without a dedicated slot in the school week, reading for pleasure can drop significantly. Our first pilot school made good use of the elibrary when it first launched and usage generally held up, although it dropped off in select weeks when the reading for pleasure slot was taken by other things (e.g. sports day). In year 2 the dedicated slot was allocated to another task and use of the elibrary disappeared. Other pilot schools, who have maintained a regular curriculum slot for reading, show much higher levels of activity.
This experience highlights one of the problems with reading for pleasure – that of measurement. We know that data monitoring facilitates accountability. This is why the functional aspects of reading – decoding, comprehension, inference - are directly tested in the SATs. If we can get quantitative data on reading for pleasure this will help both teachers and policy makers. Digital libraries collect quantitative data on reading for pleasure automatically, so it is easy for teachers to see exactly who is reading what. Moreover, if children were routinely using digital books via school logins government could use this data to provide a picture of reading for pleasure across time and space, facilitating a comparison of behaviours in different demographic groups as well as different ages.
Recommendations:
We recommend schools be given quantitative targets for reading for pleasure that include number of hours in the school week devoted to reading for pleasure. This could be achieved by weekly or even daily reading for pleasure slots in the school day.
[5] How have changes in the number of local libraries and library opening hours impacted on children and young people's access to books outside school?
Anecdotal evidence from our pilot schools suggests it has become more difficult for schools to take their pupils on library visits. One school said with the level of SEN they needed 5 adults to accompany a single class visit. Another school said that their local library had advised they didn’t want more than 10 children visiting at a time, but there were insufficient staff resources to supervise a split class. Another school said the library was not open when the school was able to visit.
More importantly, our pilot schools told us that even with a class visit they are not able to sign their children up to the public library service; all they can do is send the registration form home with the pupil but are then reliant on the parents to sign up the children. It is then tricky to use the digital books in school as not all children have access, and for those who are members, teachers may not have access to their login details. This effectively rules out using digital books from the public library service in the classroom.
Our pilot schools are only a small sample, and we were interested to see if there are public libraries working more closely with schools so we submitted an FOI request asking if they operate a scheme with schools in their area for the school to register their pupils with the local library service. The overwhelming response was no. Some libraries mentioned that they did facilitate class visits. One library (Cambridgeshire County Council) noted a pilot project: ‘We do not formally have a scheme in place for registering schools with Cambridgeshire Libraries. For the last two years we have been running a pilot project with Education, focused at signing up all primary school children in Wisbech and Huntingdon.’
Recommendations
We recommend mandatory school enrolment of children in their local public library service. This would allow universal access to the local public library digital book service.
[6] What further measures should the Government take to increase the numbers of children reading for pleasure?
Invest in a centralised digital front-end Government should invest in a single digital front end to sit in front of the books children are able to borrow. This should cover digital offerings (through their local library or a national digital school library) and the physical books in their school library. Such a front end can have multiple benefits:
Reading id Allocate each child a reading id on auto enrolment with the library service. This id would follow the child throughout their schooling – across schools and geographical areas. Such data could then be analysed to track outcomes and the effectiveness of intervention measures.
Research digital and schools The position on digital books in schools is wholly unclear – how much they are used, how much schools would like this as part of the solution to the resource problem and the training needs that must be addressed to make this a reality. Government should identify how digital can assist in solving the resource crisis and what support needs to be put in place for teachers to deliver digital reading. It should examine when digital and physical books are good substitutes and when they are not, which audiences are served best by each and what that means for where the money should be allocated.
February 2026