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Original poster

4 million children don't own any books.

72 replies

MincePieFlavouredVoidka · 05/12/2011 13:46

Here

What a sad story - as someone who is always surrounded by books I find it hard to imagine them not being around.

Also what about bookstart? Both of my younger DC's have been given books by them, is it not countrywide?

OP posts:
BeerTricksPotter · 07/12/2011 11:10

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

WowOoo · 07/12/2011 11:24

I can remember chatting to a lovely lady and her son in a playgroup about a year ago. Her son was listening to the Thomas the Tank engine book I was reading to mine.
She was telling me she lets him watch T the T DVD's as she finds it hard to read. She'd never thought of going to charity shops to get picture books with simple texts. She was going to adult literacy classes in the Surestart Centre. It really affected me and made me think. You just assume that most parents can read.

griff31 · 07/12/2011 16:39

Thats really bad but not surprising.

My kids had fabric baby books

then got bookstart

Then love the sian Lloyyds books, gruffalo and thats not my series.

Both my girls as toddlers/preschoolers loved reading.

last 2xmases youngest visited santa she got a book as a presie.

Eldest gets given books by family birthday/xmas.

Eldest is 5 and since starting school especially in reception year she got bored of reading but shes getting better and brought some books at table top sale.

She getas books out from libary
I allow her to buy some at carboot/charity,

we probably have too much as bookcase overflowing but had 2 year old and 8month old.

My stepson 13 still cant read to a good standard.
Convinced he never had boosk at home he hated reading and all he did was computer. Hubby gets so frustrated with him, his mum can read.

Was documentary last year on reading c4 based on deprived area of bristol worked there its rough anyway the majority of year 7 cannot read properly and on investigation their parents couldent read was cycle especially amongst young mums.

WhoIsThatMaskedWoman · 08/12/2011 18:01

I'm having huge huge problems with "the number of children with no books has tripled in seven years". Just don't believe it - it reeks of dodgy methodology.

RiversideMum · 09/12/2011 06:58

We have a house with lots of books. My DCs have been given at least one book for every birthday and Christmas since they were born. Getting them to READ the books is a near impossibility.

LovesBloominChristmas · 09/12/2011 07:00

Sorry but I find this hard to believe.

joanofarchitrave · 09/12/2011 07:18

I must say that I was surprised by the numbers because of Bookstart and WBD. I wonder if booksellers would consider getting mobile stalls of WBD books into schools, particularly ones where a bookshop is not within walking distance of the school, as clearly spending the token is not happening in many cases.

EdithWeston · 09/12/2011 07:29

GWTC: "A large number were actively hostile to the very idea!"

Can you expand on this? I'd be really interested to know which children were saying this, an why.

This survey includes teenagers, and indeed over half the age range is secondary. I am wondering about those who become disengaged from education who are very unlikely to read or admit to reading. This may or may not be correlated to reading fluency. But I'm ready to bet that it's strongly correlated to leaving school without GCSEs.

redskyatnight · 09/12/2011 10:45

When DD was in Reception everyone in the class was given 2 free books (think this was BookTrust?). The next day, one little boy brought them back, saying that his mum and dad "didn't want them cluttering up the house" Sad

Stripy1 · 09/12/2011 11:04

This has really shocked me. But maybe I live in a bubble and shouldn't be shocked at these kind of facts or there are 4 million children who are regular library users!
However I would be interested to know how they came up with this figure - I don't think my children were asked???

PontyMython · 09/12/2011 11:33

Redsky that's so sad.

Hopefully the parents just meant they already had those books and didn't want duplicates?

MildlyNarkyPuffin · 09/12/2011 12:14

Those of us in libraries need to take the library out into the community more.

You can't make parents care about their child's education.

Sevenfold · 09/12/2011 12:15

the idea of children not owning books is very sad

redskyatnight · 09/12/2011 12:19

*PontyMython" sadly, (based on my knowledge of this child) I don't think this was the reason. To give credit to the Reception teacher I believe she ended up passing the books on to the boy's gran (who picked him up once a week and was lovely) so hopefully he did get to keep them.

BeerGrinchPotter · 09/12/2011 16:25

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

OrmIrian · 09/12/2011 16:29

Oops! DS2 and DD have got them all Blush

Sorry.

Grin

Seriously, I think that between them they could build a full-size model of Big Ben with them.

Ladymuck · 10/12/2011 11:08

I grew up in a house with no books. Plenty of my friends did too. My parents still have no books in their house. They did read plenty of disposable stuff, such as newspapers and magazines, but they never would re-read a book and so viewed them as clutter.

Thumbinnapuddingwitch · 10/12/2011 12:40

"The number has increased from seven years ago, the last time the poll was conducted, when it stood at one in 10 youngsters, meaning the number of children without books has triped." [sic]
This did make me smile ironically - no doubt it's a typo but given the scepticism around methodology/extrapolation etc., it was quite a funny one.

It's very sad, I think. My DH has very few books, no real love of reading and would probably live in a book-free house given a choice - but he hasn't got a choice, as I am a complete bookworm and have hundreds, if not thousands of books (60 of our removal boxes were my books alone). DS has loads too - I buy them for him regularly, and had stockpiled several collections even before I was pregnant, just because they came up for sale at The Book People or whatever.

I don't know what can be done to remedy the situation though, especially when the parents view books as "clutter" :(.

Ladymuck · 10/12/2011 13:28

Thank goodness for the kindle! And all the websites etc that our children log onto and read.

Idratherbemuckingout · 22/12/2011 09:32

I live in France, in Brittany to be precise, in the country, not in a town, which is a different thing to living in the countryside in the UK, I can tell you. I have only been in two Breton houses where there were books, and both parents in these houses were well educated professionals. All the other houses I have been in (my son is eleven so friends houses) there have been NO books.
Also, when he started primary school at age 6, I went to the evening where the teachers explained what the children were going to study over the next year, and noticed that in the year above him, they were given ONE tiny thin book per term to read. A book that would take my son a couple of hours maximum to read from cover to cover.
There are also very few book shops - and the selection they stock is poor. LIkewise the libraries are very small, with few books in them you would actually want to read.
We joined the local library for my son, but it is pathetic. We buy him all his books and his big brother gets new ones for him as he works in Waterstones. He's lucky, his four big brothers and sisters see books as very important. He is also surrounded by wonderful text books that his father and I have collected, so has his own reference library at his finger tips.
So I wonder how many children in France do not own a book? Quite a lot I imagine, as it is a much more rural country than the UK.

And I agree, it is the parents who do not recognise education or books as being important that are at fault. In both countries.

ZZZenAgain · 23/12/2011 11:56

"It must be mainly down to how you were brought up and education/schooling not being able to break the cycle of bad parenting being passed down from generation to generation. I do find it deeply sad that schools are not capable of instilling a love, or at least, a respect of books in the vast majority of their pupils, no matter what their upbringing."

I totally agree with that comment and yes, someone asked further down if it is really possible to have been born in the UK, passed through compulsory school education and still be illiterate - it is. I can't remember the statistics on adult illiteracy but it is not just confined to immigrants who did not receive much schooling before arriving in the UK. It is also a home-grown problem. I am not sure how it is possible to pass through secondary without this being picked up on, seems very unlikely, but apparently it does happen. I suppose if a dc is not helped in time, it becomes an embarrassing problem and a dc might try to just hide it by playing up and pretending disinterest or boredom with the work when in fact the dc cannot read the texts to do the work set.

I am not that bothered if dc , even many dc, do not actually own a book but they should be reading nonetheless. It is not that you need to own books but you need to be accessing and reading them. It would be nice if all dc had a good selection of books at home but at the least we need schools furnishing them with books and the dc borrowing library books. That statistic about dc reading less than 9 books a month worries me more tbh. You can have a pile of books on the shelves at home gathering dust, read once and neglected. Another person's child may borrow 20 a week from the library but own none.

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