Why do I care about a Spark?

Last week I gave a TEDx talk for TEDxGrantham about children and reading, and specifically about what actually creates a reader.

Two people came up to me afterwards and told me I’d made them cry. I thought it might have been due to the hideous stats, they were grim, but actually it was because they were thinking about their own children and whether they’d read to them enough and for the children that didn’t have people reading to them. It had hit them somewhere they weren’t expecting.

Shortly after I spoke, a teacher pulled me aside and told me that children are arriving at her primary school not only unable to read and write, but without knowing their own body parts. That’s basic vocabulary, words for the world immediately around them. She said she was doing her best to ensure that children in her class got reading time and had guests in to read with them, but they were limited with what they could achieve.

I’ve been thinking about what she said ever since, because it makes the problem bigger and more important than a literacy gap. Children who arrive without the words for their own bodies haven’t had enough adult conversation. Enough being talked to, read to, genuinely paid attention to. Reading aloud is one of the most direct ways to address that, because it builds vocabulary, attention, relationship and comprehension at the same time, and it costs nothing except time and care.

I gave this talk because I have spent almost fifteen years inside publishing watching the industry respond to a literacy crisis by doing everything except addressing what’s actually missing. The numbers are getting worse, not better, and the response has been more testing, more campaigns, more beautifully packaged books that sit on shelves in front of children who never learned to want what’s inside them. I gave it because my mum was sitting in that audience, and she is the reason I can read at all, and I wanted to say that out loud.

We know now through research that our children are falling behind in their learning, potential earnings and worse, their life expectancy. Not just in the UK but globally.

Those numbers matter, but what I keep coming back to is the teacher’s face when she told me what she sees every September.

The ‘Spark’ is human to human connection, social engagement and the only mechanism that has ever worked to create a reader.

I want to help change the future, if we don’t address this now, we create a generation of children who are not curious, who do not dream and who get locked in a world of Youtube./TikTok shorts, with no attention spans and no way out.

I know it’s going to take a village of parents, schools, libraries and people willing to give a damn to make this change,

I’m in, are you?