Books v Screens: Why Every School Needs a Library (Katherine Rundell)

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0:43BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Itamol here. Welcome back, I hope, to Radical. Conversations about the deep global trends that are shaping this crazy era in human history and hopefully offering you, me and everyone who comes on this show, a safe space to encounter, to challenge the radical ideas that you need to win the future. In this episode, we're talking about reading, words, literacy. And why is it that only one in three 8 to 18 year olds in this country say they enjoy reading in their spare time? One in three, one in three 8 to 18 year olds say they enjoy reading in their spare time.

1:22And this whole issue of literacy and why it is that reading seems to be in sustained, if not terminal decline, especially among young people, is something which is rising up the political agenda. So the UK government has now declared that 2026 will be the national year of reading. And what they want to do is encourage parents like me to read to their children and to try and renew the family hubs that were based on the Sure Start model pioneered by New Labour. And if you're looking for someone to really champion the idea that reading, that books, that words should be central to every single childhood and that books can transform not just individual lives but whole worlds, well, this week's guest is someone who has spent a lifetime doing just that.

2:05She is a hugely successful academic and also best-selling children's author. It is Catherine Rundle. She's got some pretty radical ideas about what we could do to get kids reading.

2:31Catherine, how are you? I'm well. I'm so delighted to be here. Very nice to see you. What's it like writing books that people actually read? And millions of people read and have become... And what's it like to be called a cult author? You didn't see that coming when you were applying to All Souls years ago, did you? It has been incredibly thrilling to meet kids who have read the books remains one of the great delights of my life. And especially nice to, with Impossible Creatures, because it's going to go on. It's a different experience. I mean, it's been, I think it's sold, is it 462 million copies so far.

3:08The book that you've done is the first of five. Is that right? First of five. And so I'm currently writing book three and then definitely two more. but then keep thinking of things like, you know, in a dream world, there are 34 islands. I'd love to write 34 tiny books. You know, ideally, I want to never leave that world. But, I mean, equally, talk to me again in four years. You might have had enough of it. So my great hero, George Orwell, who has, there's a statue of him outside, and he wrote this wonderful essay called Why I Write, and it opens with the words from a very early age, about the age of five or six, I knew that when I grow up, I should be a writer.

3:43How old were you when you decided that you wanted to be a writer? really really small because I was obsessed by books young and at first I don't think I had the grasp on the idea that books are made by people I think I just thought they sort of were one of the many iterations of the world and then when I realized people have that as a job that you get to sit and create stories that seemed to me to surpass any possible job I was so thrilled by the idea, I think I was about five, and I started telling my parents stories, which would be extremely long, breathtakingly dull and pointless. And they just incredibly kindly humoured me and let me tell them my epic tales, all of which would have just been, you know, descriptions of horses.

4:31Oh my goodness. How old were you when you moved to Zimbabwe? Because you were born in the UK and you moved to Zimbabwe, I think because one of your parents got a post or something. How old were you when you were in Zimbabwe? About eight or nine, I think. And then we left when I was 14. And what was Inbarby like? Because I was young, I'm not sure that I was fully cognizant of the politics. My father was keen that we understand things like the long shadow cast by empire. He's very left-wing and very keen to educate us about the history of the place. For me, it was mostly just the wild glory of the landscape.

5:08and a sense of the world as colossal and alive. We spend a huge amount of time outdoors, this enormous privilege to have publicly available open spaces that children can play in without supervision that would also have occasional scorpions or snakes or monkeys or birds, things that were alive. And for me, that is absolutely one of the sort of foundation stones, I think of my imagination. So did you run, was it the sort of stereotypical thing of running wild and free, allowed to play at a very early age, it was safe and therefore your parents would go for it, come back. It was the school finished early in Zimbabwe, didn't it?

5:50School finishes very early, so you will be out by maybe midday. And then, of course, my parents worked, so we were allowed to play. And it took me a really long time to understand that every parent who allows their kid that freedom is holding their nerve, is doing something, I think, profoundly generous to let a group of kids play outside in a treehouse, even just without a treehouse, just to be in a space in which enormous glory can be experienced. But also there is danger. Snakes. Snakes, cows. Cows. Like a lot of scorpions. And that they let us. And it took me, when I was an adult, to understand.

6:32I asked my mum about it. I was like, did it not worry you? And she said, oh, every second of every day. Of course, of course you're worried. But the benefit, the colossal reward of it felt large enough, I think. How much were you reading at the time? I read relentlessly. I was one of those lucky children for whom it just felt like breathing. I don't know. There's in To Kill a Mockingbird, the little girl scout says, it would not have occurred to her to say that she loved reading. you do not love breathing. And I think probably a little bit like that. I read, you know, on the bus, in the car. We had an amazing local library.

7:15And a lot of it was, I think, probably very old-fashioned. I'm not sure the books were replaced very often, but just the children's classics that I had access to. So I was able to just tear through, you know, Paddington and the Moomins and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and all of Tolkien. and just to have those for free, it felt like the most extraordinary stroke of luck. And then I also read outside, it was a very physically small bit for the children's library, it was just a couple of shelves. And so then I just started reading adult books and many of them were wildly inappropriate. But I am quite a proponent of letting kids read things that are both vastly too old for them and vastly too young for them.

8:00I think hemming in what is appropriate for a kid isn't always the best idea. If they're reading, it's good, right? This. I think this is the one thing that we all need to say to ourselves, to each other. We need them to be reading. And we'll discuss why it is so vastly important, perhaps more important than we even intuitively understand. It is absolutely fundamental to the future of this country, but also to the potential for a life that is shot through with happiness and with a sense of the world as enormous and awaiting you. I think we need readers. so if they're reading comics if they're reading song lyrics if they're reading books that you know if your kid only reads Diary of a Wimpy Kid and you're despairing stop despairing let them read just Diary of a Wimpy Kid they will find their way to the next thing my entire friendship group is going to take such reassurance from what you just said specifically with reference to that title just before we get into that I mean I've got some pretty alarming statistics which we're going to get into about the crisis and it is a crisis in reading I have a rule which is I generally don't speak to people about family issues and private stuff but I know you've spoken in the past in interviews about the fact that when you were I think 9 or 10 you lost a sister is there a sense in which, I only ask this because I'm conscious you've talked about it in public and I don't want to go further than others have, but is there a sense in which you now write for who you were when you went through what must have been an extraordinary trauma?

9:36I think I must do I certainly wouldn't have thought so when I started writing children's books, that wouldn't have seemed to me what I was doing. I think I was, I was quite young, I was 21, and I was wanting to try to lay out before I forgot it, some of the most vivid images and desires of the child heart. But I do write for 10 year olds. And the year that I was nine and then ten was a year in which my whole life changed forever and and a year in which I understood suddenly and very starkly and irrevocably about grief and about the idea that you can adore someone and it doesn't mean you get them forever so what you need to do is find a way to keep loving them and not to abandon the world itself and I think probably for me the books I read in those years just showed me so many instances of different ways of living a life different ways of being happy different ways of being honest different forms of truth.

10:56I think those books kept reminding me that however bleak the world looked, and at the time it did look very bleak, enormous joy remains possible side by side in the same hand as grief. Is your extraordinary work ethic, and it is amazing how much you've written, how many jobs you do, is your extraordinary work ethic partly owed to this early confrontation with mortality? maybe a little maybe there is a sense that you don't know how long you have so lay out what you know while you can you know what what is someone who writes for kid trying to do I guess mostly we fail totally at it everyone fails at everything they do of course but what I am trying to do is lay out for kids everything I hope and believe to be true but in a way that they will fall in love with it because you can't just tell children a blunt truth that's not how the passing on of truth works you can't say you will lose a great deal and yet it will be worth continuing to be brave because sure put it on a fridge magnet but if you write it out in long form proof over 50 ,000 words with dragons and ships and good jokes and fantastic creatures and fantastic creatures then maybe they'll believe you yeah exactly how did you go from it's a binary thing in a sense being an author and not being an author, how did you kind of wake up as a 21-year-old or maybe late 20-year-old and decide, I want to, I'm going to put, I'm going to do this, I'm going to write.

12:32Because there might be people listening to you now who are fans of your writing, who wish they were writers, who desperately want to sell some books, who want to be writers. Where did that spark come from? So I think it really was a sense. I knew it was what I'd always wanted to do. I finished my degree. I woke up with a hangover the day after I was 21 and started writing. but one of the things that stops people Was it a good party, you're 21st? It was a great party, it was a bad next day Great party, a hangover when you're 21 It's quite hard to get a hangover when you're 21 I mean you've got to go for it It's a skill of them But I think one of the things that stops people from starting is a feeling that it has to be perfect or even good I think people expect excellence from themselves in a first draft which is just unhinged There are great writers who do do great first drafts, but they are in the tiny minority.

13:26And so when I teach creative writing, one of the things that I say is, you are going to have to allow yourself to write badly or your ideas will die with you. So, you know, bad writing can always be transformed into good writing. No writing remains no writing. And so pushing past the bit of you that sits at the back of your mind and just whispers over and over again, good Lord, this is extraordinarily embarrassing. That's the bit that needs to die. In recent years, you've become quite a public, not just advocate of reading, but public, I think, campaigner for reading and someone who's publicly very concerned about a, well, point A, a decline of reading, B, what we might get onto, which is the emergence of something that might look like a post-literate society.

14:15What is the crisis in reading? So it's enormous and it's getting worse steadily. And it is that the rates of children who report reading for pleasure have been plummeting over the last 20 years. And we know that that is for an incredibly complicated and nuanced stack of reasons. but what has happened that we seem to have reached a moment in which the habit of reading and the sense of reading being something that the majority of children might do has been lost and that is a staggering loss both because so these reports are brought out by the brilliant National Literacy Trust which is a superb charity that does work promoting literacy they bring it out every year and every year we've seen these declines particularly since Covid one of the things that they are always keen to iterate is this isn't inevitable and it's not irreversible and it's not something that we should treat as if it was just a natural step in the culture we're in we need to treat it like a crisis and like a crisis that can absolutely be reversed I might need some, dare I say, radical ideas It's particularly alarming that there should have been this fall off in COVID.

15:40You'd have thought that might be a time for people to be reading more rather than less. I've got the numbers actually from the National Literacy Trust. So 34.6 % of 8 to 18 year olds surveyed by the National Literacy Trust said they enjoy reading their spare time. This is the lowest recorded by the charity since it began the survey 19 years ago. It's an 8.8 percentage drop in a single year. Part of a significant broad downward trend since 2016. Reading frequency is also at a historic low, with 20.5 % of 8 to 18-year-olds reporting reading daily in their free time. That's a drop of 7.5 % in just a single year.

16:18And two other things that are really important to this. One is the gender gap. So the gender gap in reading enjoyment has widened. So 28.2 % of boys say they enjoy reading in their free time. That's compared with 40.5 % of girls. And the other thing is poverty. When you launch a podcast called Radical about the big problems facing the world, you realise that quite a lot of them come down to poverty. And the declines in literacy are steepest amongst the poorest. And the negative consequences of not being able to read are most acutely felt by those who are from the poorest parts of society. Why do you think fewer people are reading and reading for pleasure?

16:57Fewer kids. So I think it would be this bundle of reasons. One of them is certainly austerity, is poverty. I think one of the things that our current children's laureate is Frank Cottrell-Boys, one of the greatest men in the country. And one of the things that he says over and over is if you want to reverse this declining reading, one of the things you need to do is create a new sure start. You need to go right back to the early years to create spaces and networks for new parents to have a place to go to learn about, not just about parenting, but to be in a community to watch other people, how they play with their child.

17:39And Bookstart, which was part of Sure Start, getting books into the hands of those who need it most. One of the things that Jonathan Douglas, who is the head of the National Literary Trust, was saying is he works with a network of schools in Catford. And 15 % of children in their first year of school have language skills that are so poor that they don't respond to their own names when they come to school. So even the most basic requests of these kids to sit on the mat and play with the ball, they really struggle with. and I think what is happening there, one of the hypotheses that they have is it might be to do with screens.

18:21It might be to do with in situations in which there is poverty and a real struggle just to provide basic survival. A lot of children get given screens as a form of babysitting and it seems to be having a devastating impact on their language skills. So that seems to me a sure start and creating a space for these infinitely precious new lives to be guided towards linguistic play, towards delight. So a sure start. I think we can't neglect the thing that is currently very much in the conversation, social media, phones. we do know that for instance incidences of children getting harmed outside so teenagers who are harmed while playing outside in the real world are plummeting one figure that was on question time was 70 percent down but instances of hospitalized self-harm have risen by by there There are many different figures out there, but certainly by about 20%, perhaps far more.

19:37And so I think, you know, what do kids want? They want to play. They want jokes. They want community. They want to be alongside someone. And they're finding that in their phones because where can they go? You know, we don't have leisure centres are now so expensive, far more so than it needs to be when I was a kid in Camberwell. And we don't really have town halls. We don't really have youth centres. where are these kids to go? And this does tie up to literacy in that if they have nowhere to go they will become addicted to these apps that we know were built to be addictive and once they are addicted to those the chance that we can pull them back to something that is slower and less riddled with dopamine but that has in it a profoundly richer and more meaningful form of enchantment that gets harder and harder every year.

20:32The other thing which I know you've got a great interest in is libraries. And weirdly, through the coalition years over the past decade, a lot of attention was given to the closure of public libraries. Frank Cottrell-Boy is one of many who's talked about it. And I really didn't know this. You learn a lot during a podcast, especially one called Radical. The percentage of secondary schools in the UK with a library fell from 96 % to 86 % between 2019 and 2023. figures from primary schools paint a similarly bleak picture so one in seven primary schools don't have a library and 62 percent of primary schools currently have no designated library budget to buy books or imply employ a librarian so the spirit of a library a place where books are free which is somewhere you go to rather than it coming to you as things on a smartphone do and where you're in a literally in a physical architectural infrastructure which is like a kind of cathedral of literacy that's something that's declining both within and outside of educational institutions which is a huge social change isn't it a huge social change and in fact even worse than those figures one in seven primary schools doesn't have a library but one in four in the most economically deprived areas where they are most needed and where kids are least likely to have a book in their own home they don't have a library and so it seems to me that this like if If I could have a magic wand and make one change, I think it would be insisting that every school, both primary and secondary, but especially primary, has a library and that it is assessed as part of your Ofsted criteria and that it is staffed by a librarian.

22:06Because one of the things about, you know, the teachers in this country do spectacular work. I've met many of them because I go to a lot of schools, but a lot of them don't always have a completely up to date sense of what books are out there for the kids because they're very busy. but a librarian could make sure that we were stacking when we were filling these shelves not just all the great classics that we all adored but also stuff that was out yesterday you know we need, of course we need Frank Cultural Boys and we need The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe but we also need Sharna Jackson and we need, you know, her brilliant high-rise mystery stories we need people who, you know, ideally we'd have a bit of Marcus Rashford and his non-fiction book because one of the things in that report the National Literature Report said was how do you get kids to read?

22:52Allow them to read their interests. And if your interest is football, you will need some books by footballers. Exactly. So one of my, I'm very wary, as I think I might have read, you might be as well, but I'm very wary of this idea of, you know, the book that changed my life. But there was a book that rather changed my life. And I read it when I was about 19, I think. And it was called The Uses of Literacy by a guy called Richard Hoggart. And a lot of people listening to this may know that Richard Hoggart had a son called Simon Hoggart. It was for many years, The Guardians. a parliamentary sketch writer.

23:21And Richard Hoggart wrote a book called The Uses of Literacy about growing up very poor in Leeds in the interwar years. And it was really about how access to books was a bit like you in Zimbabwe. It was a kind of passport to a new world. And it also gave him a confidence to be able to relate to people who came from richer backgrounds. And I, in preparation for this interview late last night, while one of my many, many children was refusing to sleep, tried to pull down a copy of this book. And I'm amazed I found it, actually. and I realised that maybe I was being a bit of a nostalgic idiot, pining for a glorious lost 20th century where people from poor backgrounds, growing up in industrial leads in the interwar years, had access to books, a bit like you did in Zimbabwe, as I did growing up in South London, tooting, not Camberwell, and it sort of changed their lives.

24:12And these days, Catherine, people have got games. and aren't people like you and people like me just uselessly romantic nostalgics who think that kids will go to books if given access to books and aren't we in danger of being terribly naive in assuming that if kids could get access to a nintendo switch or pokemon they might choose the great works of katherine rundle instead so the best question I think one of the things we need to reckon is there was never a time when everybody out there was just really, really eager to read Jane Eyre. Was it then? Hang on a second. I work for Radio 4. You can't say that sort of thing.

25:03But I think we have this moment now in which children have their lives flooded with pastimes that will produce a short, sharp buzz of pleasure. But we know that that pleasure doesn't lead you anywhere. It tells you very little about the world. It can end up becoming the source of the greatest horror in your life. So, for instance, kids who report using compulsively their phones, and particularly social media, are also more likely very significantly to experience suicidal ideation. Pokemon, of course, a different thing. And in a dream world, I think that there would be room for all of it, for Nintendo Switch, for Pokemon, for books.

25:56But I think that we need to reckon that some of the most recent manifestations of ways to engage children were designed with profit at the heart of them and with no interest in the health and safety and well-being and happiness, the delight, the sense of themselves as people in the world of children. Do you think, I know where you stand on whether or not people ought to read and the enchantment it can provide. Do you think that we're moving towards a post literate culture where the mass consumption of ideas in the long 20th century magazines, periodicals, books, you know, you know, chick lit is it called?

26:45fantastic novels, great canon and so forth was primarily done through the printed word years and centuries after Gutenberg but we're moving towards in the past 10 years actually a form of technology through social media where most consumption of pastimes or ideas is through short form video and therefore just the idea that you mostly consume ideas through printed words is becoming a kind of thing of the past? I hope not. And also, I don't think so. I think, I hope that the moment we're in now will be seen as a strange epoch on the way to something else. I really profoundly hope so. The main reason I hope so is, I think, being able to read a long, careful, nuanced, sustained argument is at the heart of the future of democracy.

27:41It is the conditioned precedent. The idea that you can follow an idea that is big and bold and radical and exciting, you do need to be able to process words. You do need to be able to rise to the ask of a densely printed page. And I think there is always a danger that those who seek to politically dominate will take advantage of the power of erudition and the performance of erudition. And we need an educated populace in order to resist the sort of, the siren song that can sometimes be wielded out by rhetoric. We need people who are aware of what is happening, who are able, you know, one of the things that the Scandinavian countries are doing is they have as a requirement in schools a sort of media literacy programme which essentially is teaching them how to work out what is and isn't fake news, what appears to be really carefully resourced and reliable information versus information that is just tempting and sticky, but in fact not true.

28:59Are we heading towards a post-literate society? I would need to see greater evidence to believe that we are. on the grounds that the written word has been found the finest way to transmit our best jokes and our boldest ideas for thousands of years. I feel like 10 years would be quite a short amount of time to destroy that. I have an idea. It's an idea that's going to get me in trouble, but I'm going to put it out there anyway. And then I want to hear your ideas. I want people. I can't say this. Can I? I really believe in rote learning of poetry. And my dear dad, who took great pride in the fact that I studied English at Cambridge, produce, you know, he knew by rote huge amounts of Shakespeare and Milton, John Donne is in there, huge amounts.

29:50And his favorite poem was Thomas Gray's Elegy written in the country churchyard, which I can mostly do by rote. I'm not going to do it now. And I, I believe that if you learn a poem by rote, you've got a friend for life. and I really believe that that should be something that all kids get the benefit of but I think it's cast as a somehow elitist argument isn't that weird? I would be so thrilled if we could start bringing back the idea that when you read a poem as you say what you have is then it's under your skin, in your blood, forever you carry it with you and when we think about poetry we often think of it as being profoundly elitist and perhaps a don in an ivory tower.

30:34The two populations who are engaged most intimately with poetry in this country are teenagers and inmates of prisons, by far. Really? Yeah, it's really, really significant. We often think that teens will reject poetry as being in some way rarefied or irrelevant to them, but they write it more than almost anyone else. It's short, it's compact, it's knotty, it's often shot through with a rich emotionality. And then in prisons, inmates are often very keen to both read and write their own poetry. So I think if we could somehow haul poetry out of the imaginative space we currently seem to have put it in, where it's something...

31:21Fusty or old school. Fusty and old school, essentially homework and make it more into... Because, of course, that's a relatively recent iteration and it's British. That isn't the case. I've done a lot of work writing programmes with refugees and a lot of Syrian and Afghan young people. For them, poetry has always been part of their imagination. It never stopped being so. Exactly. And of course, if you put a beat over it, you can call it hip hop and suddenly everyone remembers it. What would you do in terms of making children's literacy fundamental to teacher training? What's a way of trying to make this agenda of yours, which is kind of, you know, the revival of reading, particularly as it benefits those who are most disadvantaged, how do you institutionalise it?

32:02So return of Sure Start, but what else might you do? So I think this is so interesting and a complicated one, because what we want is to ideally get teachers deeply involved in children's literature as it is now, so that ideally you would put children's fiction in the curriculum for teachers as they are doing their teacher training. but also reading for pleasure, not just reading as a skill. Because there's this fascinating fact that when Blair came in, in the 97 government, the sort of education, education, education banner, they really put a huge amount of emphasis on literacy skills. And they rolled out a programme that prioritised the skills over pleasure.

32:47They referred to reading for pleasure as literally collateral damage. There was a sense that, yes, kids aren't enjoying it as much, but their ability to read was higher than that of previous cohorts. But when they then tested that same cohort at the end of secondary school, their literacy was lower than any cohort since the Second World War. If you don't make sure that when children are reading, they are reading for delight, for fun, for imagination, for discovery, then it won't bed in. then it doesn't actually do the thing that we long for reading to do, which is lead people out into an enormous world and show them how absolutely extraordinary and wide it is.

33:36So I know that you have great sympathy with teachers. You've already said that. But my teachers in secretary school is listening to you now saying, I'm up against it. I'm in school till 7.30 every night marking endless homework. I've got a classroom of 35 kids. Two of them are smoking fags in the back. How are you going to help me? What are you going to do to make this easier? What needs to go to make room for this in the curriculum? What does need to go? I wish I knew. Something has to go. Something has to go. Something has to go. I guess I would say this. I don't know what has to go. But I do think that we have perhaps, over successive governments, lost the sense that it's the pleasure bit that is the important bit.