Bridging the north-south literacy divide
Just 2 in 5 children in the North West say they enjoy reading in their free time. The National Literacy Trust's new Salford hub hopes to change that
By Ruth Green
Two ends of the same table tell a familiar story. At one, a group of girls chat excitedly, giggling as they pore over a new book. At the other, boys the same age are messing about and joking around.
“You do notice the difference between boys and girls,” Katherine, their teacher, tells me as we watch one boy flick a pen cap across the table so that it comes to a stop by our feet. “Sorry,” she says, mouthing at the boy to apologise as I hand the cap back. “He’s great with numbers,” she says, turning back to me, “and he’s got lovely handwriting, but he’s just not interested in reading.”
It’s a longstanding stereotype that girls enjoy reading more than boys. This is often borne out in the classroom, or in this case, in a recent workshop held at the FutureSkills Academy in Media City, to launch the National Literacy Trust’s (NLT) new literacy hub in Salford.
We’re halfway through the morning, and 90 Year 3 pupils from three local primary schools are already engrossed in a fact-finding workshop with Preston-based author and illustrator Emily Coxhead. I walk around the table to speak to some girls and ask them why they like reading. “You get to experience fun things,” Talayha, aged 8, tells me.
It’s a simple answer to a simple question, but her response speaks volumes about what intrinsically motivates children to read. This is particularly significant in a city like Salford, where government data last year revealed that 36.7% of children entered primary school without the essential literacy skills needed to thrive, compared with 31.2% nationally.
“Literacy is fundamentally a matter of social justice,” says Jonathan Douglas, the NLT’s CEO, to a room full of stakeholders later in the afternoon, after the children have gone home. Framing literacy as a social justice issue may not be a completely novel idea, but it does speak to the charity’s drive to ensure children are equipped with the necessary tools to transcend their upbringing and discover worlds far beyond the confines of the classroom.
It’s well documented that schools across the UK are under increasing pressure to do more and cover more, despite ever-shrinking budgets, but year on year the statistics lay bare the disturbing reality that literacy levels and academic attainment are increasingly influenced by inequalities outside of school.
Salford is no exception. It’s the 19th most deprived area in England. This goes far in explaining why, although it was the site of the UK’s first public lending library in 1850, today literacy rates in the city are among the worst in the country.
Last year, fewer than half of five-year-olds from Salford’s most disadvantaged areas achieved a “good” level of development at the end of the early years’ foundation stage, compared with 69.3% of their peers from non-disadvantaged areas.
These factors made the city a prime choice for the NLT to launch its 20th literacy hub, a community-based approach to tackling literacy challenges in the UK’s most deprived areas. Bea Worrell is leading the recruitment for Salford’s new Literacy Champions – local volunteers who will work to support literacy projects across the city. She’s only been in the job eight weeks at the time of the launch, but she has already signed up seven volunteers.
While Worrell says Salford suffers from many of the inner-city challenges seen in areas like Manchester and Birmingham, where the NLT already has hubs, she says it’s the city’s lack of proper resources – including support for pupils who speak English as an additional language – that make these problems particularly acute.
Salford’s lacklustre literacy rates also speak to a broader regional problem. This summer’s GCSE results showed that the gap between pass rates in the south and the north of England has continued to worsen since the pandemic, reinforcing longstanding concerns over a north-south divide in educational outcomes.
North-south divide
The latest government data indicates that 73% of 11-year-olds in the North West are leaving school with the expected level of literacy, compared with 78% in London.
Deprivation, social and racial inequalities and the greater risk of children entering care all play a part in influencing this disparity, but that’s not the whole picture.
Jason Vit, Head of Local Areas at the NLT, says the charity’s research has also revealed a “reading-for-enjoyment divide” that may get to the nub of the issue. “London actually has the highest level, and it's still only 51.5% of kids [who] say that they enjoy reading on a regular basis,” Vit tells me. “In the North West that's as low as 41.7 – so that’s a 10 percentage point gap in terms of the number of children who say they enjoy reading between London and the North West.”
Put bluntly, just 2 in 5 children in the North West say they enjoy reading in their free time – the lowest level recorded by the charity in almost 20 years.
The question, then, is how to tackle that enjoyment divide. Vit says there’s no easy answer, but literacy hubs like the latest one in Salford may be part of the solution. “We recognise that, actually, enjoyment and aspiration and motivation come from your identity, from being proud of the place you're from and from finding authors and stories that speak to your experience, that of your family, your community and your background,” he says.
This belief has driven the charity’s locally led approach. “Tackling that north-south divide is about investment and resources and all of those kind of macro issues, but it's also about recognising that solutions are in the communities where people are living and where they're growing up,” he says.
The NLT has used this tried-and-tested formula up and down the country, establishing local hubs and working alongside local partners to give children access to books, improve library provision in primary schools and support both primary and secondary schools’ literacy needs.
Salford-born and -bred Martha O’Brien worked in the city as a librarian for 20 years and really knows the nuts and bolts of what it takes to make books come alive for children. “There are a lot of people that don’t realise that literacy isn’t just about reading novels – it’s about giving people ways to escape,” she says. “It’s about reading non-fiction, graphic novels or anything that they’re into. This is going to be an opportunity for readers to find their pleasure points.”
Role models
At the launch, the school children are tasked with looking at Coxhead’s new book Happy Days: 365 Facts to Brighten Every Day of the Year and coming up with their own Salford happy facts. O’Brien has plans to roll out this challenge to 79 primary schools across Salford. Each pupil will be given their own copy of Coxhead’s book and ultimately their own book will be compiled based on their fact-finding.
Coxhead first got involved with the NLT when she designed one of 20 book bench sculptures that were dotted around Salford in the summer of 2022 to encourage local children to read. Looking around the room two years later, she can’t contain her enthusiasm about the NLT’s latest project.
Coxhead says that having more visual and colourful resources really helped her learning when she was at school. “So I really wanted to create a book that reflected that style.”
In the adjacent hall, Curtis Jobling, who rose to fame as the production designer behind Bob the Builder, and more recently, Raa, Raa, the Noisy Lion, is helping the children find and illustrate facts that inspire them.
Following his success on screen, Jobling, who now lives in Warrington, also writes young adult novels. He says the NLT’s community-based approach to tackling literacy challenges is on point. “Television will never teach children to learn,” he says. “People learn through family and friends and communities, and it’s ideally something that they engage with. Don’t push the envelope, lick it shut.”
Bringing together role models like Coxhead and Jobling at FutureSkills – a college many of these children might aspire to attend one day – has really resonated with the children. One boy delights in telling me how much Coxhead enjoyed hearing his fun fact. Another girl declares the morning has “been better than school”.
For Rachel, a reception teacher and literacy lead at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Salford, the experience has been invaluable. “It’s been so inspiring for the children having local, positive role models that aren’t just footballers,” she says.
I also speak to Julie and Jane from St. Paul’s Church of England Primary School in Salford, who have almost 50 years of teaching experience between them. The chance to see real-life local authors is one thing, says Julie, but “it’s also showing you should keep up your hobbies, like drawing.” Maybe one day they’ll grow up to be authors and illustrators, too.
Jane, who gave up teaching eight years ago but still works as a secretary at St. Paul’s, says of her own grandchildren, “As they get older, they become less interested in reading. They lose that spark.”
The long shadow of Covid
The conversation turns to the impact of the pandemic. The three classes attending the launch all started school in September 2021. So although their primary education wasn’t interrupted by the first series of lockdowns, studies have shown that this cohort is less likely to meet expected levels of development compared with older year groups.
We’re now seeing what Vit terms as “the long shadow of Covid” on schools up and down the country. He admits the impact has been very “mixed” depending on children’s particular circumstances. While some benefited from more time at home with their parents during lockdown, others will have experienced poor social and developmental skills caused by increased time with screens and in isolation.
All the teachers I speak to say the impact of Covid lockdowns on pupils’ literacy and emotional development has been stark. “The pandemic was like a time capsule,” as Jane puts it.
A report by the Centre for Young Lives think tank and the Child of the North initiative found that the pandemic worsened early years developmental issues, particularly for vulnerable children. In 2022-23 around a third of children were deemed not "school ready". This figure is expected to rise for the current reception cohort, who were born just before or during the pandemic and whose early years development was severely affected by successive lockdowns.
This is one reason Salford City Council has got behind the project to try and break the spiral of intergenerational illiteracy in the city. “Since the pandemic, we've seen a real drop in the literacy levels for children,” says Cathy Starbuck, director of education and inclusion at Salford City Council. “ Enabling them to be able to catch up on those really key skills has just not been possible.”
The scale of the problem has convinced the council to commit to investing £250,000 a year in the new hub for the next three years as part of its broader ambition to become a “child-friendly city”. Starbuck, a former secondary school teacher, has witnessed first-hand how reading for pleasure has felt increasingly “squeezed out of the curriculum”.
She believes this investment will help schools reignite children’s love of reading and close the attainment gaps that have widened during the pandemic. “The work is very much about complementing what the schools are doing, because the schools can't address the gaps on their own, and they really need the support of stakeholders in their communities,” she says. “We've got a lot of willingness in the city for partners,” she adds, “and with the investment, I hope that's a real opportunity to make a difference.”
Intergenerational challenges
Naturally, many of the program’s volunteers are parents or people who are already involved in education initiatives. The NLT also wants to call on community resources like local businesses as well as figures like youth leaders and football coaches, to ensure children in the most disadvantaged pockets of Salford have access to reading. “We want to create reading as a habit, and we’re trying to get a reading conversation going,” says Worrell. She says the books they donated to one food bank were snapped up in a matter of days. Ultimately, she hopes all food banks in the city will have “dedicated reading corners” with books aimed at early-years readers right up to young adults.
It’s hoped that by focusing on the “transition points” – from early years to finishing primary and the first few years of secondary school – the hub will help narrow literacy gaps across the community.
Some related issues, like the higher rates of absence that have grown progressively worse nationally since the pandemic, may be a harder nut to crack. Once again, persistent absentee levels were viewed as a significant contributing factor in causing children in the north to fall behind pupils in London and the south-east in this summer’s GCSE exam results.
Although short-term and long-term illness and exceptional circumstances often justify absences, the government says 89% of fines for unauthorised absences are issued for term-time holidays. In a bid to improve attendance, in August 2024 the government increased fines for school absences across England from £60 to £80 if paid within 21 days, or £160 if paid within 28 days.
All schools are required to consider fines when a child has missed 10 or more sessions – or five days – for unauthorised reasons. However, many parents seem undeterred by the prospect of receiving a fine if they can take a significantly cheaper holiday during term time. The cap on fines, with each parent receiving no more than two fines for the same child over a three-year period, may also do little to prevent regular absenteeism in disadvantaged communities like Salford.
I ask Katherine, who teaches Year 3 at Rose Hill Primary School in Salford, if the fines are likely to make any difference. She shakes her head. “You tend to find that if the parents haven’t had a valuable time at school then they don’t value school attendance.”
This underlines why tackling illiteracy is an intergenerational challenge. More often than not, it’s not a case of encouraging pupils to turn up, but convincing parents it’s worthwhile to send them in at all.
Like many schools, Rose Hill has devised various initiatives to encourage attendance, including a dedicated 15 minutes of “chatter time” to kick off the school day. “Attendance is a bit of a problem at all schools in the area,” admits Katherine. “We wanted to think of a positive and uplifting way of beginning the day, and “chatter time” really allows the children to focus on sentence structure and modelling how to speak.”
This innovative approach to promoting oracy, or the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically in speech, in a less formalised way is just one example of how schools are trying to tackle the problem outside of the classroom as well as in.
The Salford hub has already secured funding for three years. Realistically, every staff member I speak to says their literacy hubs need to be embedded in local communities for at least 10 years if they’re to make a lasting difference. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Blackpool hub has managed to recruit more than 100 voluntary literacy champions since 2020 – an achievement that should surely give the Salford team confidence as they launch in a city facing similar inequalities and literacy challenges.
I manage to grab O’Brien later in the afternoon just before she rushes off to help open a new primary school library in the city – the charity’s 34th in the UK to date. Beyond putting together “Salford’s Happy Facts”, she has big aspirations for the hub over the next year. “We’d really like to create another literacy trail and give families the opportunity to get out and about and find out more about the city,” she says. The trail concept is still in its inception, but O’Brien is certain that bringing literacy back to learning about Salford’s environment is key. Especially if it takes 10 years to truly see results, time will tell if the literacy hub makes lasting change — but for now, hopes are high that the hub will help more kids discover the entertaining and transformative power of a really good book.
Thank you for this and other long thoughtful essays on social issues. As an expat raised in Old Trafford and now living in Paris, I learned a lot from this pieces, especially Salford's first pub5lic lending library. Manchester also pioneered popular literary and philosophical societies (Lit & Phil) in the late 18th century.
I reflect often on differences between Britain, the US and France, allowing for internal divisions. One is that British humour and class is strongly verbal, in the other two visual. Adult comic books are very popular; there is a major market for Japanese manga and anime. My young daughter won a medal at Bac in literature and languages.Her imagination is strikingly visual. She never read a classical print novel, but found Jane Austen through TV drama series, Alexandre Dumas through the Three Musketeers movie trilogy. She cherishes both now.
This is quite apart from where Gen Z (the first generation to exceed the Boomers, 2 bn out of 8 bn worldwide) get their information, from social media not print sources. The gender divide between reading and numbers is important. But in this case, making the problem and argument hinge on statistics of "the North-South Divide" misses out how the digital revolution is altering experience of communications both as learning and imagination. I wonder if the origins of The Mill's founders has something to do with it
None of this diminishes my admiration for what you are contributing to the twin cities' revival.