Enjoying Reading

Enjoying Reading offers new solutions to help every child love reading.

Enjoying Reading is an important new initiative funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families DCSF to help every child love reading. It encourages schools and libraries to work more closely together. It helps schools understand how public libraries and schools library services can help them, and how, together, they can get more children reading more.

As Jim Knight MP, Minister of State for Schools and Learners, said: "Children's enjoyment of reading is critical to their life chances but schools alone can't crack this. The Department for Children, Schools and Families believes more joined up working between schools and libraries can make a big difference and is funding the Enjoying Reading initiative to provide inspiration, ideas and practical support. The National Year of Reading is the perfect time to start to strengthen this alliance."

Enjoying Reading started out as a toolkit we produced in 2004 (which you can still download from Resources). The newly launched Enjoying Reading website shows how schools can make the best of what each part of the library system has to offer. It includes research, case studies, an ideas bank and other resources which all demonstrate how teachers and library staff working together can bring more reading to more children.

There are Enjoying Reading booklets available for primary and secondary schools. And we are also producing new resources to allow more teachers to build on the highly successful Summer Reading Challenge which involves over 650,000 children in libraries every year.

Our partners in Enjoying Reading are:
National Literacy Trust
School Library Association
Society of Chief Librarians
Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians
Museums Libraries and Archives Council

Other organisations also think that Enjoying Reading is a good thing and are supporting it. These include the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Ofsted, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, United Kingdom Literacy Association and the National Strategies for primary and secondary education.