Reading for Pleasure, Darren Matthews

19 August 2026

Darren is a primary advisory teacher at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education – a charity that aims to improve the life chances of children by ensuring that every child has access to quality experiences of literacy and that all teachers have the knowledge and resources to support children to become confident, happy and enthusiastic readers and writers. Prior to working for CLPE, Darren was a primary teacher and school leader in the London Borough of Havering, specialising in leading curriculum development, literacy, music and SEND.

This National Year of Reading has provided all of us with a moment to reflect, take stock, take action and see where we stand in terms of young people’s engagement with reading in our settings, in our homes and across communities, and consider the extent to which they identify as readers… and the value they place on reading.

The concept of ‘reading for pleasure’ has been around for a long time now – hundreds of years – with the phrase coming in and out of fashion as so many things in education do. You might find that some prefer the precision in phrases such as ‘volitional reading’, ‘recreational reading’, ‘voluntary reading’… I could go on. However, fundamentally we’re talking about the same thing and have the same goal – generations of young people who have the access, volition, the skills and the will, the choice and the opportunity to read for meaning, for purpose and for pleasure…

The research has long attested to the long term and widespread positive impact that can be associated with – if not necessarily completely attributed to – young children who choose to read and who see themselves as readers.

Despite the understanding of its importance, and the investment of time, energy and funding (especially since it was name-checked in the National Curriculum in 2014), and the amazing work being done by so many who work with and on behalf of young people, the annual National Literacy Trust reading enjoyment surveys continue to tell us that only around a third of young people report that they enjoy reading (down from just over 50% between 2012-2019).

While that is the national picture, at CLPE we have the great pleasure of working alongside many schools who have a robust and inspiring reading for pleasure ethos… where children don’t only learn how to read but discover along the way why they would want to. Places where quality books are valued and shared. Where time is regularly dedicated to engaging with reading in a multitude of ways. Where both direct and implied messages around the value of reading are clear. Where reading role models abound. There is great practice out there, so what might the missed opportunities be – what obstacles are there?

As the National Year of Reading comes into its last quarter and many schools and other organisations are starting to think about its legacy and the potential ongoing impact, we’re going to need to ask: what is it that makes a difference? What are the crucial ingredients in a school’s very DNA (with apologies for the mixed metaphor) that foster young people who can and do read, who see the value and meaning and purpose and – yes – pleasure in being a reader?

Let’s breakdown a few of the essentials – but, before I do, worth saying that it’s tough to talk about the elements that make a rich and successful reading culture without leaning on the enduring work of Aidan Chambers. I’d always highly recommend – if you haven’t already done so – adding The Reading Environment and Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk to your staffroom bookshelf – it is essential reading!

First item on my list is simple: do all children have access to books? Books in the classroom, books in the school library, borrowed from the local library, books that they own and treasure, books in their hands… It sounds obvious: children need access to books to become readers. Reading, of course, is much wider, than just book reading, so we’ll also need to think about magazines, posters, newspapers, comics, leaflets, maps, etc. And we also need to consider the value and necessity of different types of reading – not only word reading, but audio books, wordless texts, interactive texts, screen-based reading – the list goes on and on, but for the practical purposes of a blog word count, let’s stick with books for now.

Of course, access to just any books is not going to be sufficient. These books need to be attractive for the reader. They need to be tempting and inviting and – frankly – completely irresistible. And, because no two potential readers are the same, you will naturally need an incredibly wide and rich variety of books available for children to browse, select, read and recommend so that they have a chance of finding the right book for them. This means a variety of forms: novels, illustrated texts, short stories, chapter books, picturebooks (for all ages), graphic novels, poetry collections and anthologies, inspiring non-fiction… and variety in terms of genre and tone – funny or thrilling, fantastical or realistic, drama, adventure, horror…

Ensuring that there is a book out there that every reader can make a connection with means that our texts – and the writers, illustrators and poets that create them – need to be diverse and representative of the students, their community and their world. They also need to feel relevant - and so contemporary stories and voices are going to be crucial too. There’s nothing wrong with a classic – I’m sure that we all have our own nostalgic weakness (mine is Meg & Mog!) and there are inevitably some classic titles that we hope children might discover for themselves or that we might choose to include in our curriculum choices (not too many though!). However, the books that they really want to read and connect with are likely to have been predominantly written and published much more recently. I can’t help but wonder why so many ‘100 Books You Must Read Before Year 6’ type lists feature titles that were published when I was a child – or earlier!

Alright, if we assume then that our classroom bookshelves and our school libraries are rich, diverse, enticing, contemporary, varied and just full of great books, what next?

Children need to have the freedom to choose what they want to read… There’s little point having all of these wonderful books on the shelves, if children are directed to select their book from a much smaller subset of those titles. I hear time and again from young students who tell me that they know what they want to read, but that it’s got the wrong colour sticker on it, or it’s not on their shelves, in their book box. In 2018, the International Literacy Association, noted that “children balk at text lists classified by age, gender, or reading level, as these boundaries set potential and real limits around children’s experiences of reading.” If we don’t value children’s own choices as readers, then we undermine their whole identity as a reader and run the risk that they will decide that the world of reading simply isn’t a place for them. So you’ll want to ask: how much autonomy do children in your setting have over their reading choices?

As Harvey Daniels famously said: “You can’t fall in love with a book someone stuffs down your throat” – however, well-meaning that ‘someone’ might be! But that’s not to say that the adults in a child’s life don’t have a crucial role to play in supporting and making more manageable the process of browsing and choosing. As readers ourselves, we can use our knowledge of children’s books to ensure that we are better placed to recommend possible books to a child that isn’t sure what to choose next, and that make reading both exciting and accessible. Meanwhile, the books we choose to read aloud, teach from, or platform in a multitude of ways have the ability to broaden and enhance children’s knowledge of the wide range of exciting books that they can choose to pick up. Every day, we have the opportunity to demonstrate to children through our talk and our behaviours, through our own excitement about a newly discovered book, what it means to be a reader and the value we place in the books around us.

Finally, a too-short mention of provision and practice (this could certainly be a whole blog in its own right!). In The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading and Writing by Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking (Routledge, 2024), we are reminded that “reading for pleasure is not a bolt on, added extra, or series of activities to tick off.” A meaningful and pleasurable reading experience should be at the heart of every encounter a child has with a book – it isn’t only the reading aloud time at the end of the day (although that’s crucial), and it certainly isn’t only the dressing up assembly once a year or the too-rare author visit (although, again, that can be transformative) – it is your whole curriculum. From the core literacy lesson to a reading intervention group, from a phonics session to read alouds, and even cross-curricular research, and volitional reading time… Each of these should recognise the child as a unique reader with their own unique response, giving them time and space to share that response so that they know that their opinion and their tastes as a reader are of value. Each of these elements of practice must be necessarily rooted in the experience of reading for meaning – and finding meaning in text is fundamental to making it feel worthwhile and, hopefully, pleasurable in a multitude of ways. This type of practice is at the heart of what it means to be a reader.

All of this – and more – is examined in greater depth in CLPE’s free research booklet on this theme (What We Know Works: Reading for Pleasure), all of our teaching resources are focused on meaningful, accessible and engaging reader experiences, and we offer specific training and INSET focused on Developing a Reading for Pleasure School.