Professor Holly Joseph and Dr Daisy Powell, Institute of Education, explain how a collaboration between researchers, community organisations and a local library helped to instil a love of reading in young families in Whitley.
Shared storybook reading has many well-evidenced benefits for children’s development, from cognitive and linguistic skills to an enduring love of reading and bonding between parent and child. Shared storybook reading has also been linked to children’s school attainment from school entry and beyond. This has led to many initiatives aimed at encouraging book-related activities.
We recently published a piece in The Conversation, commenting that sessions run in libraries for young children and their parents may not always feel welcoming for all families – for example where parents struggle with literacy or where parent-child shared storybook reading was not something they experienced as children. However, this is not always the case, and we wanted to share an example of where libraries are indeed highly successful in this sort of work, and how we as academics can work collaboratively with community organisations to maximise the chance of success.
Over the last few years, we have been working in parts of South Reading with high reported levels of deprivation, and where children’s attainment in school is below the national average. The broad aim of our work is to encourage a love of reading in young families, as there is clear evidence now that children who experience lots of book-related activities at home do better at school.
Our initial enquiries led us to a small local children’s library, where the manager had been very successful in establishing strong links with the local community, running a programme of events including regular “rhyme-time” sessions which were inclusive and very well attended. We were invited to carry out our first set of parent-toddler storytime sessions within this local library. Each session focussed on a particular storybook, and the aim was to familiarise children with a new story, as well as build parents’ confidence in reading to their children in an engaging way. At the end of the sessions, families were given a copy of each book to keep.
The sessions were highly successful, benefitting from the trust built up by the library manager with local families. We also set up an adult book club, which met in the thriving local community centre where there were also strong existing links with the University. When our initial funding ran out, Reading Libraries agreed to continue to support the group through supplying books, and the book club is still thriving today.
Wanting to extend the initial work we’d carried out, we decided to move the storybook sessions to a community centre in a nearby neighbourhood, expecting sessions to be equally successful. We were disappointed to discover that attendance was low – clearly, our previous success had been as much due to the trust built up between the local library manager and the community, as well as existing links between the community centre and the University. This inspired us to change our approach, working with community researchers to build up connections with families in the immediate vicinity of this community centre to build up our networks, and consulting with community members to find out what was wanted, and to overcome potential barriers to attendance.
The community researchers, both local mothers and former teachers, then ran a series of highly successful parent-toddler storytime sessions, receiving very positive feedback from families involved. Thanks to public generosity following media coverage, a crowdfunding initiative raised enough money to continue the sessions for an additional year. We’ve since extended the work to another local community centre and have secured funding from Reading Borough Council for these sessions to continue for a further year.
The insights from this project have transformed how we approach our work. We’ve learned that a participatory approach, where community members are involved in all aspects of the initiative from design to delivery and evaluation, is crucial in ensuring that local people feel welcome and engage in the sessions, and ultimately that they are a success.
We welcome contributions to support our mission to bring books and a love of reading to young families across the Whitley ward – donate here.
We are very grateful to Reading Libraries for sharing their expertise and resources, and to Reading Borough Council, the John Sykes Foundation, Research England, Friends of Reading, The Englefield Trust and the University of Reading for funding this work.