How can we ensure we give our most disadvantaged students the gift of reading, not just the gift of books?
According to the National Literacy Trust, one in eight children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds don’t have a book of their own at home. This can make the decision to gift books to students seem like a quick win.
Given the correlation between early encounters with books and shared reading and language development, there’s no wonder that schools may choose to take part in book gifting schemes using Pupil Premium funding, or select books in-house to gift pupils.
It seems logical: improve equity around accessibility to books and we ‘gift’ privileged access into the worlds (and words) that books often hold. However, recent research about the impact of book gifting schemes suggest that they need to be long-term to positively influence home literacy environments. Past EEF trials have corroborated that book gifting approaches can fail in reaching their aims of improving reading and building interest in reading.
